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THE WORLD I LIVE IN 



THE 
WORLD I LIVE IN 



BY 



HELEN KELLER 







NEW YORK 

THE CENTURY CO. 

1908 



tit** 



LIBRARY of CONGRESS 

Two Copies Received 

OCT 22 1908 

Copyright Entry _ 
CLASS CL, Mc, No, 
COPY B. 



Copyright, 1904, 1908, by 
The Century Co. 

Published October, 1908 



THE DE VINNE PRE8S 



TO 

HENRY H. ROGERS 

MY DEAR FRIEND OF 
MANY YEARS 



CONTENTS 




CHAPTER 

i The Seeing Hand . 


PAGE 

. 3 


ii The Hands of Others 


. 17 


hi The Hand of the Race . 


. 28 


iv The Power of Touch 


. 38 


v The Finer Vibrations 


. 52 


vi Smell, the Fallen Angel 


. 64 


vii Relative Values of the Senses 


. 78 


viii The Five-sensed World . 


. . 84 


ix Inward Visions 


. 93 


x Analogies in Sense Perception 


. 104 


xi Before the Soul Dawn . 


. 113 


xii The Larger Sanctions 


. . 122 


xiii The Dream World 


. . 134 


xiv Dreams and Reality . 


. . 156 


xv A Waking Dream 


. . 166 


A Chant of Darkness . . 


. . 183 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

Helen Keller in her Study . . . Frontispiece / 

FACING PAGE 

"Listening" to the Trees .....'. 70 / 

The Medallion . 126 ' 

The Little Boy Next Door . . . . . 172 y 






PREFACE 



The essays and the poem in this book 
appeared originally in the "Century 
Magazine," the essays under the titles 
"A Chat About the Hand," "Sense and 
Sensibility," and "My Dreams." Mr, 
Gilder suggested the articles, and I 
thank him for his kind interest and en- 
couragement. But he must also accept 
the responsibility which goes with my 
gratitude. For it is owing to his wish 
and that of other editors that I talk so 
much about myself. 

Every book is in a sense autobio- 
graphical. But while other self-record- 
ing creatures are permitted at least to 
seem to change the subject, apparently 
nobody cares what I think of the tariff, 
the conservation of our natural re- 
sources, or the conflicts which revolve 
xi 



PREFACE 



about the name of Dreyfus. If I offer 
to reform the educational system of the 
world, my editorial friends say, "That is 
interesting. But will you please tell us 
what idea you had of goodness and 
beauty when you were six years old?" 
First they ask me to tell the life of the 
child who is mother to the woman. 
Then they make me my own daughter 
and ask for an account of grown-up 
sensations. Finally I am requested to 
write about my dreams, and thus I be- 
come an anachronical grandmother ; for 
it is the special privilege of old age to 
relate dreams. The editors are so kind 
that they are no doubt right in thinking 
that nothing I have to say about the af- ^ 
fairs of the universe would be interest- 
ing. But until they give me opportunity 
to write about matters that are not-me, 
the world must go on uninstructed and 
unref ormed, and I can only do my best 
with the one small subject upon which I 
am allowed to discourse, 
xii 



PREFACE 



In "The Chant of Darkness" I did 
not intend to set up as a poet. I thought 
I was writing prose, except for the mag- 
nificent passage from Job which I was 
paraphrasing. But this part seemed to 
my friends to separate itself from the 
exposition, and I made it into a kind of 
poem. 

H. K. 

Wrentham, Massachusetts, 
July 1st, 1908. 



X311 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 



I 

THE SEEING HAND 

Ihave just touched my dog. He was 
rolling on the grass, with pleasure in 
every muscle and limb. I wanted to 
catch a picture of him in my ringers, and 
I touched him as lightly as I would cob- 
webs; but lo, his fat body revolved, 
stiffened and solidified into an upright 
position, and his tongue gave my hand a 
lick! He pressed close to me, as if he 
were fain to crowd himself into my 
hand. He loved it with his tail, with his 
3 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

paw, with his tongue. If he could 
speak, I believe he would say with me 
that paradise is attained by touch; for 
in touch is all love and intelligence. 

This small incident started me on a 
chat about hands, and if my chat is 
fortunate I have to thank my dog-star. 
In any case, it is pleasant to have some- 
thing to talk about that no one else has 
monopolized; it is like making a new 
path in the trackless woods, blazing the 
trail where no foot has pressed before. 
I am glad to take you by the hand and 
lead you along an untrodden way into a 
world where the hand is supreme. But 
at the very outset we encounter a diffi- 
culty. You are so accustomed to light, 
I fear you will stumble when I try to 
guide you through the land of darkness 
and silence. The blind are not supposed 
to be the best of guides. Still, though I 



THE SEEING HAND 



cannot warrant not to lose you, I prom- 
ise that you shall not be led into fire or 
water, or fall into a deep pit. If you 
will follow me patiently, you will find 
that "there 's a sound so fine, nothing 
lives 'twixt it and silence," and that 
there is more meant in things than meets 
the eye. 

My hand is to me what your hearing 
and sight together are to you. In large 
measure we travel the same highways, 
read the same books, speak the same 
language, yet our experiences are dif- 
ferent. All my comings and goings 
turn on the hand as on a pivot. It is the 
hand that binds me to the world of men 
and women. The hand is my feeler with 
which I reach through isolation and 
darkness and seize every pleasure, every 
activity that my fingers encounter. 
With the dropping of a little word from 
5 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

another's hand into mine, a slight flutter 
of the fingers, began the intelligence, 
the joy, the fullness of my life. Like 
Job, I feel as if a hand had made me, 
fashioned me together round about and 
molded my very soul. 

In all my experiences and thoughts I 
am conscious of a hand. Whatever 
moves me, whatever thrills me, is as a 
hand that touches me in the dark, and 
that touch is my reality. You might as 
well say that a sight which makes you 
glad, or a blow which brings the sting- 
ing tears to your eyes, is unreal as to say 
that those impressions are unreal which 
I have accumulated by means of touch. 
The delicate tremble of a butterfly's 
wings in my hand, the soft petals of 
violets curling in the cool folds of their 
leaves or lifting sweetly out of the 
meadow-grass, the clear, firm outline of 
6 



THE SEEING HAND 



face and limb, the smooth arch of a 
horse's neck and the velvety touch of his 
nose— all these, and a thousand result- 
ant combinations, which take shape in 
my mind, constitute my world. 

Ideas make the world we live in, and 
impressions furnish ideas. My world is 
built of touch-sensations, devoid of 
physical color and sound ; but without 
color and sound it breathes and throbs 
with life. Every object is associated in 
my mind with tactual qualities which, 
combined in countless ways, give me a 
sense of power, of beauty, or of incon- 
gruity : for with my hands I can feel the 
comic as well as the beautiful in the 
outward appearance of things. Re- 
member that you, dependent on your 
sight, do not realize how many things 
are tangible. All palpable things are 
mobile or rigid, solid or liquid, big or 
7 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

small, warm or cold, and these qualities 
are variously modified. The coolness of 
a water-lily rounding into bloom is dif- 
ferent from the coolness of an evening 
wind in summer, and different again 
from the coolness of the rain that soaks 
into the hearts of growing things and 
gives them life and body. The velvet 
of the rose is not that of a ripe 
peach or of a baby's dimpled cheek. 
The hardness of the rock is to 
the hardness of wood what a man's 
deep bass is to a woman's voice 
when it is low. What I call beauty I 
find in certain combinations of all these 
qualities, and is largely derived from 
the flow of curved and straight lines 
which is over all things. 

"What does the straight line mean to 
you?" I think you will ask. 

It means several things. It symbol- 
8 



THE SEEING HAND 



izes duty. It seems to have the quality 
of inexorableness that duty has. When 
I have something to do that must not be 
set aside, I feel as if I were going for- 
ward in a straight line, bound to arrive 
somewhere, or go on forever without 
swerving to the right or to the left. 

That is what it means. To escape this 
moralizing you should ask, "How does 
the straight line feel?" It feels, as I 
suppose it looks, straight — a dull 
thought drawn out endlessly. Elo- 
quence to the touch resides not in 
straight lines, but in unstraight lines, or 
,in many curved and straight lines 
together. They appear and disappear, 
are now deep, now shallow, now broken 
off or lengthened or swelling. They 
rise and sink beneath my fingers, they 
are full of sudden starts and pauses, and 
their variety is inexhaustible and won- 
9 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

derful. So you see I am not* shut out 
from the region of the beautiful, though 
my hand cannot perceive the brilliant 
colors in the sunset or on the mountain, 
or reach into the blue depths of the 
sky. 

Physics tells me that I am well 
off in a world which, I am told, knows 
neither color nor sound, but is made in 
terms of size, shape, and inherent 
qualities; for at least every object 
appears to my fingers standing solidly 
right side up, and is not an inverted 
image on the retina which, I under- 
stand, your brain is at infinite though 
unconscious labor to set back on 
its feet. A tangible object passes com- 
plete into my brain with the warmth of 
life upon it, and occupies the same place 
that it does in space; for, without ego- 
tism, the mind is as large as the universe. 
10 



THE SEEING HAND 



When I think of hills, I think of the up- 
ward strength I tread upon. When 
water is the object of my thought, I feel 
the cool shock of the plunge and the 
quick yielding of the waves that crisp 
and curl and ripple about my body. The 
pleasing changes of rough and smooth, 
pliant and rigid, curved and straight in 
the bark and branches of a tree give the 
truth to my hand. The immovable rock, 
with its juts and warped surface, bends 
beneath my fingers into all manner of 
grooves and hollows. The bulge of a 
watermelon and the puffed-up rotundi- 
ties of squashes that sprout, bud, and 
ripen in that strange garden planted 
somewhere behind my finger-tips are 
the ludicrous in my tactual memory and 
imagination. My fingers are tickled to 
delight by the soft ripple of a baby's 
laugh, and find amusement in the lusty 
11 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

crow of the barnyard autocrat. Once I 
had a pet rooster that used to perch on 
my knee and stretch his neck and crow. 
A bird in my hand was then worth two 
in the— barnyard. 

My fingers cannot, of course, get the 
impression of a large whole at a glance ; 
but I feel the parts, and my mind puts 
them together. I move around my 
house, touching object after object in 
order, before I can form an idea of the 
entire house. In other people's houses I 
can touch only what is shown me — the 
chief objects of interest, carvings on the 
wall, or a curious architectural feature, 
exhibited like the family album. There- 
fore a house with which I am not famil- 
iar has for me, at first, no general ef- 
fect or harmony of detail. It is not a 
complete conception, but a collection of 
object-impressions which, as they come 
12 



THE SEEING HAND 



to me, are disconnected and isolated. 
But my mind is full of associations, sen- 
sations, theories, and with them it con- 
structs the house. The process reminds 
me of the building of Solomon's temple, 
where was neither saw, nor hammer, nor 
any tool heard while the stones were 
being laid one upon another. The 
silent worker is imagination which de- 
crees reality out of chaos. 

Without imagination what a poor 
thing my world would be ! My garden 
would be a silent patch of earth strewn 
with sticks of a variety of shapes and 
smells. But when the eye of my mind 
is opened to its beauty, the bare ground 
brightens beneath my feet, and the 
hedge-row bursts into leaf, and the rose- 
tree shakes its. fragrance everywhere. I 
know how budding trees look, and I en- 
ter into the amorous joy of the mating 
13 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

birds, and this is the miracle of imagina- 
tion. 

Twofold is the miracle when, through 
my fingers, my imagination reaches 
forth and meets the imagination of an 
artist which he has embodied in a sculp- 
tured form. Although, compared with 
the life-warm, mobile face of a friend, 
the marble is cold and pulseless and un- 
responsive, yet it is beautiful to my 
hand. Its flowing curves and bendings 
are a real pleasure ; only breath is want- 
ing ; but under the spell of the imagina- 
tion the marble thrills and becomes the 
divine reality of the ideal. Imagination 
puts a sentiment into every line and 
curve, and the statue in my touch is in- 
deed the goddess herself who breathes 
and moves and enchants. 

It is true, however, that some sculp- 
tures, even recognized masterpieces, do 
14 



THE SEEING HAND 



not please my hand. When I touch 
what there is of the Winged Victory, 
it reminds me at first of a headless, limb- 
less dream that flies toward me in an 
unrestful sleep. The garments of the 
Victory thrust stiffly out behind, and do 
not resemble garments that I have felt 
flying, fluttering, folding, spreading in 
the wind. But imagination fulfils these 
imperfections, and straightway the Vic- 
tory becomes a powerful and spirited 
figure with the sweep of sea-winds in 
her robes and the splendor of conquest 
in her wings. 

I find in a beautiful statue per- 
fection of bodily form, the qualities 
of balance and completeness. The 
Minerva, hung with a web of poetical 
allusion, gives me a sense of exhilaration 
that is almost physical; and I like the 
luxuriant, wavy hair of Bacchus and 
15 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

Apollo, and the wreath of ivy, so sug- 
gestive of pagan holidays. 

So imagination crowns the experience 
of my hands. And they learned their 
cunning from the wise hand of another, 
which, itself guided by imagination, led 
me safely in paths that I knew not, 
made darkness light before me, and 
made crooked ways straight. 



16 



\ 



II 

THE HANDS OF OTHERS 

The warmth and protectiveness of 
the hand are most homef elt to me 
who have always looked to it for aid and 
joy. I understand perfectly how the 
Psalmist can lift up his voice with 
strength and gladness, singing, "I put 
my trust in the Lord at all times, and 
his hand shall uphold me, and I shall 
dwell in safety." In the strength of the 
human hand, too, there is something 
divine. I am told that the glance of a 
beloved eye thrills one from a distance; 
but there is no distance in the touch of 
a beloved hand. Even the letters I re- 
ceive are— 
2 17 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

Kind letters that betray the heart's deep 

history, 
In which we feel the presence of a hand. 

It is interesting to observe the differ- 
ences in the hands of people. They 
show all kinds of vitality, energy, still- 
ness, and cordiality. I never realized 
how living the hand is until I saw those 
chill plaster images in Mr. Hutton's 
collection of casts. The hand I know in 
life has the fullness of blood in its veins, 
and is elastic with spirit. How different 
dear Mr. Hutton's hand was from its 
dull, insensate image! To me the cast 
lacks the very form of the hand. Of 
the many casts in Mr. Hutton's collec- 
tion I did not recognize any, not even 
my own. But a loving hand I never 
forget. I remember in my fingers the 
large hands of Bishop Brooks, brimful 
of tenderness and a strong man's joy. 
18 



THE HANDS OF OTHERS 

If you were deaf and blind, and could 
have held Mr. Jefferson's hand, you 
would have seen in it a face and heard a 
kind voice unlike any other you have 
known. Mark Twain's hand is full of 
whimsies and the drollest humors, and 
while you hold it the drollery changes to 
sympathy and championship. 

I am told that the words I have just 
written do not "describe" the hands of 
my friends, but merely endow them with 
the kindly human qualities which I 
know they possess, and which language 
conveys in abstract words. The criti- 
cism implies that I am not giving the 
primary truth of what I feel; but how 
otherwise do descriptions in books I 
read, written by men who can see, ren- 
der the visible look of a face? I read 
that a face is strong, gentle; that it is 
full of patience, of intellect; that it is 
19 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

fine, sweet, noble, beautiful. Have I 
not the same right to use these words in 
describing what I feel as you have in 
describing what you see ? They express 
truly what I feel in the hand. I am sel- 
dom conscious of physical qualities, and 
I do not remember whether the fingers 
of a hand are short or long, or the skin 
is moist or dry. No more can you, with- 
out conscious effort, recall the details of 
a face, even when you have seen it many 
times. If you do recall the features, 
and say that an eye is blue, a chin sharp, 
a nose short, or a cheek sunken, I fancy 
that you do not succeed well in giving 
the impression of the person,— not so 
well as when you interpret at once to the 
heart the essential moral qualities of the 
face— its humor, gravity, sadness, spir- 
ituality. If I should tell you in physical 
terms how a hand feels, you would be 
20 



THE HANDS OF OTHERS 

no wiser for my account than a blind 
man to whom you describe a face in de- 
tail. Remember that when a blind man 
recovers his sight, he does not recognize 
the commonest thing that has been fa- 
miliar to his touch, the dearest face inti- 
mate to his fingers, and it does not help 
him at all that things and people have 
been described to him again and again. 
So you, who are untrained of touch, do 
not recognize a hand by the grasp ; and 
so, too, any description I might give 
would fail to make you acquainted with 
a friendly hand which my fingers have 
often folded about, and which my affec- 
tion translates to my memory. 

I cannot describe hands under any 
class or type; there is no democracy of 
hands. Some hands tell me that they do 
everything with the maximum of bustle 
and noise. Other hands are fidgety and 

# 21 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

unadvised, with nervous, fussy fingers 
which indicate a nature sensitive to the 
little pricks of daily life. Sometimes I 
recognize with foreboding the kindly 
but stupid hand of one who tells with 
many words news that is no news. I 
have met a bishop with a jocose hand, a 
humorist with a hand of leaden grav- 
ity, a man of pretentious valor with a 
timorous hand, and a quiet, apologetic 
man with a fist of iron. When I was 
a little girl I was taken to see 1 a woman 
who was blind and paralyzed. I shall 
never forget how she held out her small, 
trembling hand and pressed sympathy 
into mine. My eyes fill with tears as I 
think of her. The weariness, pain, dark- 

1 The excellent proof-reader has put a query to my use 
of the word " see. " If I had said "visit," he would have 
asked no questions, yet what does "visit" mean but 
" see " (visitarej ? Later I will try to defend myself for 
using as much of the English language as I have suc- 
ceeded in learning. 



THE HANDS OF OTHERS 

ness, and sweet patience were all to be 
felt in her thin, wasted, groping, loving 
hand. 

Few people who do not know me will 
understand, I think, how much I get of 
the mood of a friend who is engaged in 
oral conversation with somebody else. 
My hand follows his motions; I touch 
his hand, his arm, his face. I can tell 
when he is full of glee over a good joke 
which has not been repeated to me, or 
when he is telling a lively story. One 
of my friends is rather aggressive, and 
his hand always announces the coming 
of a dispute. By his impatient jerk I 
know he has argument ready for some 
one. I have felt him start as a sudden 
recollection or a new idea shot through 
his mind. I have felt grief in his hand. 
I have felt his soul wrap itself in dark- 
ness majestically as in a garment. An- 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 



other friend has positive, emphatic 
hands which show great pertinacity of 
opinion. She is the only person I know 
who emphasizes her spelled words and 
accents them as she emphasizes and ac- 
cents her spoken words when I read her 
lips. I like this varied emphasis better 
than the monotonous pound of unmodu- 
lated people who hammer their meaning 
into my palm. 

Some hands, when they clasp yours, 
beam and bubble over with gladness. 
They throb and expand with life. 
Strangers have clasped my hand like 
that of a long-lost sister. Other people 
shake hands with me as if with the fear 
that I may do them mischief. Such per- 
sons hold out civil finger-tips which they 
permit you to touch, and in the moment 
of contact they retreat, and inwardly 
you hope that you will not be called 



THE HANDS OF OTHERS 

upon again to take that hand of "dor- 
mouse valor." It betokens a prudish 
mind, ungracious pride, and not seldom 
mistrust. It is the antipode to the hand 
of those who have large, lovable natures. 

The handshake of some people makes 
you think of accident and sudden death. 
Contrast this ill-boding hand with the 
quick, skilful, quiet hand of a nurse 
whom I remember with affection be- 
cause she took the best care of my 
teacher. I have clasped the hands of 
some rich people that spin not and toil 
not, and yet are not beautiful. Beneath 
their soft, smooth roundness what a 
chaos of undeveloped character! 

I am sure there is no hand comparable 
to the physician's in patient skill, merci- 
ful gentleness and splendid certainty. 
No wonder that Ruskin finds in the sure 
strokes of the surgeon the perfection of 
25 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

control and delicate precision for the 
artist to emulate. If the physician is a 
man of great nature, there will be heal- 
ing for the spirit in his touch. This 
magic touch of well-being was in the 
hand of a dear friend of mine who was 
our doctor in sickness and health. His 
happy cordial spirit did his patients 
good whether they needed medicine or 
not. 

As there are many beauties of the 
face, so the beauties of the hand are 
many. Touch has its ecstasies. The 
hands of people of strong individuality 
and sensitiveness are wonderfully mo- 
bile. In a glance of their finger-tips 
they express many shades of thought. 
Now and again I touch a fine, graceful, 
supple-wristed hand which spells with 
the same beauty and distinction that you 
must see in the handwriting of some 
26 



THE HANDS OF OTHERS 

highly cultivated people. I wish you 
could see how prettily little children 
spell in my hand. They are wild flowers 
of humanity, and their finger motions 
wild flowers of speech. 

All this is my private science of 
palmistry, and when I tell your fortune 
it is by no mysterious intuition or Gipsy 
witchcraft, but by natural, explicable 
recognition of the embossed character in 
your hand. Not only is the hand as easy 
to recognize as the face, but it reveals its 
secrets more openly and unconsciously. 
People control their countenances, but 
the hand is under no such restraint. It 
relaxes and becomes listless when the 
spirit is low and dejected; the muscles 
tighten when the mind is excited or the 
heart glad; and permanent qualities 
stand written on it all the time. 



m 



Ill 

THE HAND OF THE RACE 

Iook in your "Century Dictionary," or 
-J if you are blind, ask your teacher 
to do it for you, and learn how many 
idioms are made on the idea of hand, 
and how many words are formed from 
the Latin root manus— enough words to 
name all the essential affairs of life. 
"Hand," with quotations and com- 
pounds, occupies twenty- four columns, 
eight pages of this dictionary. The 
hand is defined as "the organ of appre- 
hension." How perfectly the definition 
fits my case in both senses of the word 
"apprehend"! With my hand I seize 
and hold all that I find in the three 
28 






THE HAND OF THE RACE 

worlds— physical, intellectual, and spir- 
itual. 

Think how man has regarded the 
world in terms of the hand. All life is 
divided between what lies on one hand 
and on the other. The products of skill 
are manufactures. The conduct of af- 
fairs is management. History seems to 
be the record— alas for our chronicles of 
war! — of the manceuvers of armies. 
But the history of peace, too, the narra- 
tive of labor in the field, the forest, and 
the vineyard, is written in the victorious 
sign manual— the sign of the hand that 
has conquered the wilderness. The 
laborer himself is called a hand. In 
manacle and manumission we read the 
story of human slavery and freedom. 

The minor idioms are myriad; but I 
will not recall too many, lest you cry, 
"Hands off!" I cannot desist, however, 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

from this word-game until I have set 
down a few. Whatever is not one's own 
by first possession is second-hand. That 
is what I am told my knowledge is. But 
my well-meaning friends come to my 
defense, and, not content with endowing 
me with natural first-hand knowledge 
which is rightfully mine, ascribe to me 
a preternatural sixth sense and credit to 
miracles and heaven-sent compensations 
all that I have won and discovered with 
my good right hand. And with my left 
hand too ; for with that I read, and it is 
as true and honorable as the other. By 
what half -development of human power 
has the left hand been neglected? 
When we arrive at the acme of civiliza- 
tion shall we not all be ambidextrous, 
and in our hand-to-hand contests against 
difficulties shall we not be doubly tri- 
umphant? It occurs to me, by the way, 
30 



THE HAND OF THE RACE 

that when my teacher was training my 
unreclaimed spirit, her struggle against 
the powers of darkness, with the stout 
arm of discipline and the light of the 
manual alphabet, was in two senses a 
hand-to-hand conflict. 

No essay would be complete with- 
out quotations from Shakspere. In the 
field which, in the presumption of my 
youth, I thought was my own he has 
reaped before me. In almost every 
play there are passages where the 
hand plays a part. Lady Macbeth's 
heartbroken soliloquy over her little 
hand, from which all the perfumes of 
Arabia will not wash the stain, is the 
most pitiful moment in the tragedy. 
Mark Antony rewards Scarus, the 
bravest of his soldiers, by asking Cleo- 
patra to give him her hand: "Commend 
unto his lips thy favoring hand." In a 
31 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

different mood he is enraged because 
Thyreus, whom he despises, has pre- 
sumed to kiss the hand of the queen, 
"my playfellow, the kingly seal of high 
hearts." When Cleopatra is threatened 
with the humiliation of gracing Caesar's 
triumph, she snatches a dagger, exclaim- 
ing, "I will trust my resolution and my 
good hands." With the same swift in- 
stinct, Cassius trusts to his hands when 
he stabs Caesar : "Speak, hands, for me!" 
"Let me kiss your hand," says the blind 
Gloster to Lear. "Let me wipe it first," 
replies the broken old king; "it smells of 
mortality." How charged is this single 
touch with sad meaning ! How it opens 
our eyes to the fearful purging Lear 
has undergone, to learn that royalty is 
no defense against ingratitude and 
cruelty! Gloster's exclamation about 
his son, "Did I but live to see thee in my 



THE HAND OF THE RACE 

touch, I 'd say I had eyes again," is as 
true to a pulse within me as the grief he 
feels. The ghost in "Hamlet" recites 
the wrongs from which springs the 
tragedy : 

Thus was I, sleeping, by a brother's hand 
At once of life, of crown, of queen 
dispatch' d. 

How that passage in "Othello" stops 
your breath — that passage full of bitter 
double intention in which Othello's sus- 
picion tips with evil what he says about 
Desdemona's hand; and she in innocence 
answers only the innocent meaning of 
his words: "For 't was that hand that 
gave away my heart." 

Not all Shakspere's great passages 
about the hand are tragic. Remember 
the light play of words in "Romeo and 
Juliet" where the dialogue, flying nim- 

3 33 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

bly back and forth, weaves a pretty 
sonnet about the hand. And who knows 
the hand, if not the lover ? 

The touch of the 'hand is in every 
chapter of the Bible. Why, you could 
almost rewrite Exodus as the story of 
the hand. Everything is done by the 
hand of the Lord and of Moses. The 
oppression of the Hebrews is translated 
thus : "The hand of Pharaoh was heavy 
upon the Hebrews." Their departure 
out of the land is told in these vivid 
words: "The Lord brought the children 
of Israel out of the house of bondage 
with a strong hand and a stretched-out 
arm." At the stretching out of the hand 
of Moses the waters of the Red Sea part 
and stand all on a heap. When the 
Lord lifts his hand in anger, thousands 
perish in the wilderness. Every act, 
every decree in the history of Israel, as 
34 



THE HAND OF THE RACE 

indeed in the history of the human race, 
is sanctioned by the hand. Is it not used 
in the great moments of swearing, bless- 
ing, cursing, smiting, agreeing, marry- 
ing, building, destroying? Its sacred- 
ness is in the law that no sacrifice is valid 
unless the sacriflcer lay his hand upon 
the head of the victim. The congrega- 
tion lay their hands on the heads of 
those who are sentenced to death. How 
terrible the dumb condemnation of their 
hands must be to the condemned! 
When Moses builds the altar on Mount 
Sinai, he is commanded to use no tool, 
but rear it with his own hands. Earth, 
sea, sky, man, and all lower animals are 
holy unto the Lord because he has 
formed them with his hand. When the 
Psalmist considers the heavens and the 
earth, he exclaims: "What is man, O 
Lord, that thou art mindful of him? 
35 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

For thou hast made him to have dominion 
over the works of thy hands." The sup- 
plicating gesture of the hand always ac- 
companies the spoken prayer, and with 
clean hands goes the pure heart. 

Christ comforted and blessed and 
healed and wrought many miracles with 
his hands. He touched the eyes of the 
blind, and they were opened. When 
Jairus sought him, overwhelmed with 
grief, Jesus went and laid his hands on 
the ruler's daughter, and she awoke 
from the sleep of death to her father's 
love. You also remember how he healed 
the crooked woman. He said to her, 
"Woman, thou art loosed from thine in- 
firmity," and he laid his hands on her, 
and immediately she was made straight, 
and she glorified God. 

Look where we will, we find the hand 
in time and history, working, building, 



THE HAND OF THE RACE 

inventing, bringing civilization out of 
barbarism. The hand symbolizes power 
and the excellence of work. The me- 
chanic's hand, that minister of elemental 
forces, the hand that hews, saws, cuts, 
builds, is useful in the world equally 
with the delicate hand that paints a wild 
flower or molds a Grecian urn, or the 
hand of a statesman that writes a law. 
The eye cannot say to the hand, "I have 
no need of thee." Blessed be the hand! 
Thrice blessed be the hands that work ! 



37 



IV 

THE POWER OF TOUCH 

Some months ago, in a newspaper 
which announced the publication of 
the "Matilda Ziegler Magazine for the 
Blind," appeared the following para- 
graph : 

"Many poems and stories must be 
omitted because they deal with sight. 
Allusion to moonbeams, rainbows, star- 
light, clouds, and beautiful scenery may 
not be printed, because they serve to 
emphasize the blind man's sense of his 
affliction." 

That is to say, I may not talk about 
beautiful mansions and gardens because 



THE POWER OF TOUCH 

I am poor. I may not read about Paris 
and the West Indies because I cannot 
visit them in their territorial reality. I 
may not dream of heaven because it is 
possible that I may never go there. Yet 
a venturesome spirit impels me to use 
words of sight and sound whose mean- 
ing I can guess only from analogy and 
fancy. This hazardous game is half the 
delight, the frolic, of daily life. I glow 
as I read of splendors which the eye 
alone can survey. Allusions to moon- 
beams and clouds do not emphasize the 
sense of my affliction: they carry my 
soul beyond affliction's narrow actuality. 
Critics delight to tell us what we can- 
not do. They assume that blindness and 
deafness sever us completely from the 
things which the seeing and the hearing 
enjoy, and hence they assert we have no 
moral right to talk about beauty, the 
39 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

skies, mountains, the song of birds, and 
colors. They declare that the very sen- 
sations we have from the sense of touch 
are "vicarious," as though our friends 
felt the sun for us ! They deny a priori 
what they have not seen and I have felt. 
Some brave doubters have gone so far 
even as to deny my existence. In order, 
therefore, that I may know that I exist, 
I resort to Descartes's method : "I think, 
therefore I am." Thus I am metaphys- 
ically established, and I throw upon the 
doubters the burden of proving my non- 
existence. When we consider how little 
has been found out about the mind, is it 
not amazing that any one should pre- 
sume to define what one can know or 
cannot know? I admit that there are 
innumerable marvels in the visible uni- 
verse unguessed by me. Likewise, O 
confident critic, there are a myriad sen- 
40 



THE POWER OF TOUCH 

sations perceived by me of which you do 
not dream. 

Necessity gives to the eye a precious 
power of seeing, and in the same way it 
gives a precious power of feeling to the 
whole body. Sometimes it seems as if 
the very substance of my flesh were so 
many eyes looking out at will upon a 
world new created every day. The 
silence and darkness which are said to 
shut me in, open my door most hospi- 
tably to countless sensations that dis- 
tract, inform, admonish, and amuse. 
With my three trusty guides, touch, 
smell, and taste, I make many excur- 
sions into the borderland of experience 
which is in sight of the city of Light. 
Nature accommodates itself to every 
man's necessity. If the eye is maimed, 
so that it does not see the beauteous face 
of day, the touch becomes more poign- 
41 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

ant and discriminating. Nature pro- 
ceeds through practice to strengthen 
and augment the remaining senses. 
For this reason the blind often hear with 
greater ease and distinctness than other 
people. The sense of smell becomes 
almost a new faculty to penetrate the 
tangle and vagueness of things. Thus, 
according to an immutable law, the 
senses assist and reinforce one another. 
It is not for me to say whether we see 
best with the hand or the eye. I only 
know that the world I see with my 
fingers is alive, ruddy, and satisfying. 
Touch brings the blind many sweet cer- 
tainties which our more fortunate fel- 
lows miss, because their sense of touch 
is uncultivated. When they look at 
things, they put their hands in their 
pockets. No doubt that is one reason 
why their knowledge is often so vague, 






THE POWER OF TOUCH 

inaccurate, and useless. It is probable, 
too, that our knowledge of phenomena 
beyond the reach of the hand is equally 
imperfect. But, at all events, we behold 
them through a golden mist of fantasy. 

There is nothing, however, misty or 
uncertain about what we can touch. 
Through the sense of touch I know the 
faces of friends, the illimitable variety 
of straight and curved lines, all surfaces, 
the exuberance of the soil, the delicate 
shapes of flowers, the noble forms of 
trees, and the range of mighty winds. 
Besides objects, surfaces, and atmo- 
spherical changes, I perceive countless 
vibrations. I derive much knowledge 
of every-day matter from the jars and 
jolts which are to be felt everywhere in 
the house. 

Footsteps, I discover, vary tactually 
according to the age, the sex, and the 
48 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

manners of the walker. It is impossible 
to mistake a child's patter for the tread 
of a grown person. The step of the 
young man, strong and free, differs 
from the heavy, sedate tread of the mid- 
dle-aged, and from the step of the old 
man, whose feet drag along the floor, or 
beat it with slow, faltering accents. On 
a bare floor a girl walks with a rapid, 
elastic rhythm which is quite distinct 
from the graver step of the elderly 
woman. I have laughed over the creak 
of new shoes and the clatter of a stout 
maid performing a jig in the kitchen. 
One day, in the dining-room of a hotel, 
a tactual dissonance arrested my atten- 
tion. I sat still and listened with my 
feet. I found that two waiters were 
walking back and forth, but not with 
the same gait. A band was playing, 
and I could feel the music-waves along 
44 



THE POWER OF TOUCH 

the floor. One of the waiters walked in 
time to the band, graceful and light, 
while the other disregarded the music 
and rushed from table to table to the 
beat of some discord in his own mind. 
Their steps reminded me of a spirited 
war-steed harnessed with a cart-horse. 

Often footsteps reveal in some mea- 
sure the character and the mood of the 
walker. I feel in them firmness and in- 
decision, hurry and deliberation, activity 
and laziness, fatigue, carelessness, ti- 
midity, anger, and sorrow. I am most 
conscious of these moods and traits in 
persons with whom I am familiar. 

Footsteps are frequently interrupted 
by certain jars and jerks, so that I know 
when one kneels, kicks, shakes some- 
thing, sits down, or gets up. Thus I 
follow to some extent the actions of peo- 
ple about me and the changes of their 
45 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

postures. Just now a thick, soft patter 
of bare, padded feet and a slight jolt 
told me that my dog had jumped on the 
chair to look out of the window. I do 
not, however, allow him to go uninvesti- 
gated; for occasionally I feel the same 
motion, and find him, not on the chair, 
but trespassing on the sofa. 

When a carpenter works in the house 
or in the barn near by, I know by the 
slanting, up-and-down, toothed vibra- 
tion, and the ringing concussion of blow 
upon blow, that he is sawing or hammer- 
ing. If I am near enough, a certain 
vibration, traveling back and forth 
along a wooden surface, brings me the 
information that he is using a plane. 

A slight flutter on the rug tells me 

that a breeze has blown my papers off 

the table. A round thump is a signal 

that a pencil has rolled on the floor. If 

46 



THE POWER OF TOUCH 

a book falls, it gives a flat thud. A 
wooden rap on the balustrade announces 
that dinner is ready. Many of these 
vibrations are obliterated out of doors. 
On a lawn or the road, I can feel only 
running, stamping, and the rumble of 
wheels. 

By placing my hand on a person's lips 
and throat, I gain an idea of many spe- 
cific vibrations, and interpret them: a 
boy's chuckle, a man's "Whew!" of sur- 
prise, the "Hem!" of annoyance or per- 
plexity, the moan of pain, a scream, a 
whisper, a rasp, a sob, a choke, and a 
gasp. The utterances of animals, 
though wordless, are eloquent to me— 
the cat's purr, its mew, its angry, jerky, 
scolding spit; the dog's bow-wow of 
warning or of joyous welcome, its yelp 
of despair, and its contented snore; the 
cow's moo ; a monkey's chatter ; the snort 
47 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

of a horse ; the lion's roar, and the terri- 
ble snarl of the tiger. Perhaps I ought 
to add, for the benefit of the critics and 
doubters who may peruse this essay, 
that with my own hand I have felt all 
these sounds. From my childhood to 
the present day I have availed myself 
of every opportunity to visit zoological 
gardens, menageries, and the circus, and 
all the animals, except the tiger, have 
talked into my hand. I have touched 
the tiger only in a museum, where he is 
as harmless as a lamb. I have, however, 
heard him talk by putting my hand on 
the bars of his cage. I have touched 
several lions in the flesh, and felt them 
roar royally, like a cataract over rocks. 

To continue, I know the plop of liquid 
in a pitcher. So if I spill my milk, I 
have not the excuse of ignorance. I am 
also familiar with the pop of a cork, the 
sputter of a flame, the tick-tack of the 
48 



THE POWER OF TOUCH 

clock, the metallic swing of the wind- 
mill, the labored rise and fall of the 
pump, the voluminous spurt of the hose, 
the deceptive tap of the breeze at door 
and window, and many other vibrations 
past computing. 

There are tactual vibrations which do 
not belong to skin-touch. They pene- 
trate the skin, the nerves, the bones, like 
pain, heat, and cold. The beat of a 
drum smites me through from the chest 
to the shoulder-blades. The din of the 
train, the bridge, and grinding ma- 
chinery retains its "old-man-of-the-sea" 
grip upon me long after its cause has 
been left behind. If vibration and mo- 
tion combine in my touch for any length 
of time, the earth seems to run away 
while I stand still. When I step off the 
train, the platform whirls round, and I 
find it difficult to walk steadily. 

Every atom of my body is a vibro- 

4 49 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

scope. But my sensations are not in- 
fallible. I reach out, and my fingers 
meet something furry, which jumps 
about, gathers itself together as if to 
spring, and acts like an animal. I pause 
a moment for caution. I touch it again 
more firmly, and find it is a fur coat flut- 
tering and flapping in the wind. To 
me, as to you, the earth seems motion- 
less, and the sun appears to move; for 
the rays of the afternoon withdraw more 
and more, as they touch my face, until 
the air becomes cool. Erom this I 
understand how it is that the shore seems 
to recede as you sail away from it. 
Hence I feel no incredulity when you 
say that parallel lines appear to con- 
verge, and the earth and sky to meet. 
My few senses long ago revealed to me 
their imperfections and deceptivity. 
Not only are the senses deceptive, but 
50 



THE POWER OF TOUCH 

numerous usages in our language indi- 
cate that people who have five senses 
find it difficult to keep their functions 
distinct. I understand that we hear 
views, see tones, taste music. I am told 
that voices have color. Tact, which I 
had supposed to be a matter of nice per- 
ception, turns out to be a matter of 
taste. Judging from the large use of 
the word, taste appears to be the most 
important of all the senses. Taste gov- 
erns the great and small conventions of 
life. Certainly the language of the 
senses is full of contradictions, and my 
fellows who have five doors to their 
house are not more surely at home in 
themselves than I. May I not, then, be 
excused if this account of my sensations 
lacks precision? 



51 



V 

THE FINER VIBRATIONS 

Ihave spoken of the numerous jars 
and jolts which daily minister to my 
faculties. The loftier and grander 
vibrations which appeal to my emotions 
are varied and abundant. I listen with 
awe to the roll of the thunder and the 
muffled avalanche of sound when the sea 
flings itself upon the shore. And I love 
the instrument by which all the diapasons 
of the ocean are caught and released in 
surging floods— the many- voiced organ. 
If music could be seen, I could point 
where the organ-notes go, as they rise 
and fall, climb up and up, rock and 
sway, now loud and deep, now high and 
52 



THE FINER VIBRATIONS 

stormy, anorr soft and solemn, with 
lighter vibrations interspersed between 
and running across them. I should say- 
that organ-music fills to an ecstasy the 
act of feeling. 

There is tangible delight in other in- 
struments, too. The violin seems beau- 
tifully alive as it responds to the lightest 
wish of the master. The distinction be- 
tween its notes is more delicate than 
between the notes of the piano. 

I enjoy the music of the piano most 
when I touch the instrument. If I keep 
my hand on the piano-case, I detect tiny 
quavers, returns of melody, and the hush 
that follows. This explains to me how 
sound can die away to the listening ear : 

. . . How thin and clear, 
And thinner, clearer, farther going ! 
O sweet and far from cliff and scar 
The horns of Elfland faintly blowing ! 
53 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

I am able to follow the dominant spirit 
and mood of the music. I catch the 
joyous dance as it bounds over the keys, 
the slow dirge, the reverie. I thrill to 
the fiery sweep of notes crossed by 
thunderous tones in the "Walkiire," 
where Wotan kindles the dread flames 
that guard the sleeping Brunhild. 
How wonderful is the instrument on 
which a great musician sings with his 
hands! I have never succeeded in dis- 
tinguishing one composition from an- 
other. I think this is possible; but the 
concentration and strain upon my atten- 
tion would be so great that I doubt if 
the pleasure derived would be commen- 
surate to the effort. 

Nor can I distinguish easily a tune 

that is sung. But by placing my hand 

on another's throat and cheek, I enjoy 

the changes of the voice. I know when 

54 



THE FINER VIBRATIONS 

it is low or high, clear or muffled, sad or 
cheery. The thin, quavering sensation 
of an old voice differs in my touch from 
the sensation of a young voice. A 
Southerner's drawl is quite unlike the 
Yankee twang. Sometimes the flow 
and ebb of a voice is so enchanting that 
my fingers quiver with exquisite plea- 
sure, even if I do not understand a word 
that is spoken. 

On the other hand, I am exceedingly 
sensitive to the harshness of noises like 
grinding, scraping, and the hoarse creak 
of rusty locks. Fog- whistles are my vi- 
bratory nightmares. I have stood near 
a bridge in process of construction, and 
felt the tactual din, the rattle of heavy 
masses of stone, the roll of loosened 
earth, the rumble of engines, the dump- 
ing of dirt-cars, the triple blows of vul- 
can hammers. I can also smell the fire- 
55 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

pots, the tar and cement. So I have a 
vivid idea of mighty labors in steel and 
stone, and I believe that I am acquainted 
with all the fiendish noises which can be 
made by man or machinery. The whack 
of heavy falling bodies, the sudden shiv- 
ering splinter of chopped logs, the crys- 
tal shatter of pounded ice, the crash of a 
tree hurled to the earth by a hurricane, 
the irrational, persistent chaos of noise 
made by switching freight-trains, the 
explosion of gas, the blasting of stone, 
and the terrific grinding of rock upon 
rock which precedes the collapse— all 
these have been in my touch-experience, 
and contribute to my idea of Bedlam, 
of a battle, a waterspout, an earthquake, 
and other enormous accumulations of 
sound. 

Touch brings me into contact with the 
traffic and manifold activity of the city. 
56 



THE FINER VIBRATIONS 

Besides the bustle and crowding of peo- 
ple and the nondescript grating and 
electric howling of street-cars, I am con- 
scious of exhalations from many differ- 
ent kinds of shops; from automobiles, 
drays, horses, fruit stands, and many 
varieties of smoke. 

Odors strange and musty, 
The air sharp and dusty 
With lime and with sand, 
That no one can stand, 
Make the street impassable, 
The people irascible, 
Until every one cries, 
As he trembling goes 
With the sight of his eyes 
And the scent of his nose 
Quite stopped — or at least much dimin- 
ished — 
"Gracious! when will this city be finished?" 1 

1 George Arnold. 

57 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

The city is interesting ; but the tactual 
silence of the country is always most 
welcome after the din of town and 
the irritating concussions of the train. 
How noiseless and undisturbing are the 
demolition, the repairs and the altera- 
tions, of nature! With no sound of 
hammer or saw or stone severed from 
stone, but a music of rustles and ripe 
thumps on the grass come the fluttering 
leaves and mellow fruits which the wind 
tumbles all day from the branches. 
Silently all droops, all withers, all is 
poured back into the earth that it may 
recreate ; all sleeps while the busy archi- 
tects of day and night ply their silent 
work elsewhere. The same serenity 
reigns when all at once the soil yields 
up a newly wrought creation. Softly 
the ocean of grass, moss, and flowers 
rolls surge upon surge across the earth. 
58 



THE FINER VIBRATIONS 

Curtains of foliage drape the bare 
branches. Great trees make ready in 
their sturdy hearts to receive again birds 
which occupy their spacious chambers 
to the south and west. Nay, there is no 
place so lowly that it may not lodge 
some happy creature. The meadow 
brook undoes its icy fetters with rip- 
pling notes, gurgles, and runs free. 
And all this is wrought in less than two 
months to the music of nature's orches- 
tra, in the midst of balmy incense. 

The thousand soft voices of the 
earth have truly found their way to me 
—the small rustle in tufts of grass, 
the silky swish of leaves, the buzz of 
insects, the hum of bees in blossoms I 
have plucked, the flutter of a bird's 
wings after his bath, and the slender 
rippling vibration of water running 
over pebbles. Once having been felt, 
59 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

these loved voices rustle, buzz, hum, 
flutter, and ripple in my thought for- 
ever, an undying part of happy mem- 
ories. 

Between my experiences and the ex- 
periences of others there is no gulf of 
mute space which I may not bridge. 
For I have endlessly varied, instructive 
contacts with all the world, with life, 
with the atmosphere whose radiant ac- 
tivity enfolds us all. The thrilling 
energy of the all-encasing air is warm 
and rapturous. Heat-waves and sound- 
waves play upon my face in infinite 
variety and combination, until I am able 
to surmise what must be the myriad 
sounds that my senseless ears have not 
heard. 

The air varies in different regions, at 
different seasons of the year, and even 
different hours of the day. The odor- 
60 



THE FINER VIBRATIONS 

ous, fresh sea-breezes are distinct from 
the fitful breezes along river banks, 
which are humid and freighted with in- 
land smells. The bracing, light, dry air 
of the mountains can never be mistaken 
for the pungent salt air of the ocean. 
The rain of winter is dense, hard, com- 
pressed. In the spring it has new vital- 
ity. It is light, mobile, and laden with a 
thousand palpitating odors from earth, 
grass, and sprouting leaves. The air of 
midsummer is dense, saturated, or dry 
and burning, as if it came from a fur- 
nace. When a cool breeze brushes the 
sultry stillness, it brings fewer odors 
than in May, and frequently the odor of 
a coming tempest. The avalanche of 
coolness which sweeps through the low- 
hanging air bears little resemblance to 
the stinging coolness of winter. 

The rain of winter is raw, without 
61 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

odor and dismal. The rain of spring is 
brisk, fragrant, charged with life-giv- 
ing warmth. I welcome it delightedly 
as it visits the earth, enriches the streams, 
waters the hills abundantly, makes the 
furrows soft with showers for the seed, 
elicits a perfume which I cannot breathe 
deep enough. Spring rain is beautiful, 
impartial, lovable. With pearly drops 
it washes every leaf on tree and bush, 
ministers equally to salutary herbs and 
noxious growths, searches out every liv- 
ing thing that needs its beneficence. 

The senses assist and reinforce each 
other to such an extent that I am not 
sure whether touch or smell tells me the 
most about the world. Everywhere the 
river of touch is joined by the brooks 
of odor-perception. Each season has its 
distinctive odors. The spring is earthy 
and full of sap. July is rich with the 
62 



THE FINER VIBRATIONS 

odor of ripening grain and hay. As the 
season advances, a crisp, dry, mature 
odor predominates, and golden-rod, 
tansy, and everlastings mark the on- 
ward march of the year. In autumn, 
soft, alluring scents fill the air, floating 
from thicket, grass, flower, and tree, 
and they tell me of time and change, of 
death and life's renewal, desire and its 
fulfilment. 



63 



VI 

SMELL, THE FALLEN ANGEL 

For some inexplicable reason the 
sense of smell does not hold the 
high position it deserves among its sis- 
ters. There is something of the fallen 
angel about it. When it woos us with 
woodland scents and beguiles us with 
the fragrance of lovely gardens, it is ad- 
mitted frankly to our discourse. But 
when it gives us warning of something 
noxious in our vicinity, it is treated as if 
the demon had got the upper hand of 
the angel, and is relegated to outer 
darkness, punished for its faithful ser- 
vice. It is most difficult to keep the true 
significance of words when one discusses 
64 



SMELL, THE FALLEN ANGEL 

the prejudices of mankind, and I find it 
hard to give an account of odor-percep- 
tions which shall be at once dignified 
and truthful. 

In my experience smell is most im- 
portant, and I find that there is high 
authority for the nobility of the sense 
which we have neglected and dis- 
paraged. It is recorded that the Lord 
commanded that incense be burnt before 
Him continually with a sweet savor. 
I doubt if there is any sensation aris- 
ing from sight more delightful than 
the odors which filter through sun- 
warmed, wind-tossed branches, or the 
tide of scents which swells, subsides, 
rises again wave on wave, filling the 
wide world with invisible sweetness. A 
whiff of the universe makes us dream of 
worlds we have never seen, recalls in a 
flash entire epochs of our dearest ex- 

5 65 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 



perience. I never smell daisies without 
living over again the ecstatic mornings 
that my teacher and I spent wandering 
in the fields, while I learned new words 
and the names of things. Smell is a 
potent wizard that transports us across 
a thousand miles and all the years we 
have lived. The odor of fruits wafts me 
to my Southern home, to my childish 
frolics in the peach orchard. Other 
odors, instantaneous and fleeting, cause 
my heart to dilate joyously or contract 
with remembered grief. Even as I 
think of smells, my nose is full of scents 
that start awake sweet memories of 
summers gone and ripening grain fields 
far away. 

The faintest whiff from a meadow 

where the new-mown hay lies in the hot 

sun displaces the here and the now. I 

am back again in the old red barn. My 

66 



SMELL, THE FALLEN ANGEL 

little friends and I are playing in the 
haymow. A huge mow it is, packed with 
crisp, sweet hay, from the top of which 
the smallest child can reach the straining 
rafters. In their stalls beneath are the 
farm animals. Here is Jerry, unre- 
sponsive, unbeautiful Jerry, crunching 
his oats like a true pessimist, resolved to 
find his feed not good— at least not so 
good as it ought to be. Again I touch 
Brownie, eager, grateful little Brownie, 
ready to leave the juiciest fodder for a 
pat, straining his beautiful, slender neck 
for a caress. Near by stands Lady 
Belle, with sweet, moist mouth, lazily 
extracting the sealed-up cordial from 
timothy and clover, and dreaming of 
deep June pastures and murmurous 
streams. 

The sense of smell has told me of a 
coming storm hours before there was 
67 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

any sign of it visible. I notice first a 
throb of expectancy, a slight quiver, a 
concentration in my nostrils. As the 
storm draws nearer, my nostrils dilate 
the better to receive the flood of earth- 
odors which seem to multiply and ex- 
tend, until I feel the splash of rain 
against my cheek. As the tempest de- 
parts, receding farther and farther, the 
odors fade, become fainter and fainter, 
and die away beyond the bar of space. 

I know by smell the kind of house we 
enter. I have recognized an old-fash- 
ioned country house because it has sev- 
eral layers of odors, left by a succession 
of families, of plants, perfumes, and 
draperies. 

In the evening quiet there are fewer 

vibrations than in the daytime, and then 

I rely more largely upon smell. The 

sulphuric scent of a match tells me that 

68 



SMELL, THE FALLEN ANGEL 

the lamps are being lighted. Later, I 
note the wavering trail of odor that flits 
about and disappears. It is the curfew 
signal; the lights are out for the night. 

Out of doors I am aware by smell and 
touch of the ground we tread and the 
places we pass. Sometimes, when there 
is no wind, the odors are so grouped that 
I know the character of the country, and 
can place a hayfield, a country store, a 
garden, a barn, a grove of pines, a farm- 
house with the windows open. 

The other day I went to walk toward 
a familiar wood. Suddenly a disturbing 
odor made me pause in dismay. Then 
followed a peculiar, measured jar, fol- 
lowed by dull, heavy thunder. I under- 
stood the odor and the jar only too well. 
The trees were being cut down. We 
climbed the stone wall to the left. It 
borders the wood which I have loved so 
69 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 



long that it seems to be my peculiar pos- 
session. But to-day an unfamiliar rush 
of air and an unwonted outburst of sun 
told me that my tree friends were gone. 
The place was empty, like a deserted 
dwelling. I stretched out my hand. 
Where once stood the steadfast pines, 
great, beautiful, sweet, my hand touched 
raw, moist stumps. All about lay 
broken branches, like the antlers of 
stricken deer. The fragrant, piled-up 
sawdust swirled and tumbled about me. 
An unreasoning resentment flashed 
through me at this ruthless destruction 
of the beauty that I love. But there is 
no anger, no resentment in nature. The 
air is equally charged with the odors of 
life and of destruction, for death equally 
with growth forever ministers to all-con- 
quering life. The sun shines as ever, and 
the winds riot through the newly opened 
70 



SMELL, THE FALLEN ANGEL 

spaces. I know that a new forest will 
spring where the old one stood, as beau- 
tiful, as beneficent. . 

Touch sensations are permanent and 
definite. Odors deviate and are fugi- 
tive, changing in their shades, degrees, 
and location. There is something else 
in odor which gives me a sense of dis- 
tance. I should call it horizon— the line 
where odor and fancy meet at the 
farthest limit of scent. 

Smell gives me more idea than touch 
or taste of the manner in which sight 
and hearing probably discharge their 
functions. Touch seems to reside in the 
object touched, because there is a con- 
tact of surfaces. In smell there is no 
notion of relievo, and odor seems to re- 
side not in the object smelt, but in the 
organ. Since I smell a tree at a dis- 
tance, it is comprehensible to me that a 
71 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

person sees it without touching it. I 
am not puzzled over the fact that he re- 
ceives it as an image on his retina with- 
out relievo, since my smell perceives the 
tree as a thin sphere with no fullness or 
content. By themselves, odors suggest 
nothing. I must learn by association to 
judge from them of distance, of place, 
and of the actions or the surroundings 
which are the usual occasions for them, 
just as I am told people judge from 
color, light, and sound. 
7 From exhalations I learn much about 
people. I often know the work they are 
engaged in. The odors of wood, iron, 
paint, and drugs cling to the garments 
of those that work in them. Thus I can 
distinguish the carpenter from the iron- 
worker, the artist from the mason or the 
chemist. When a person passes quickly 
from one place to another I get a scent 
72 



SMELL, THE FALLEN ANGEL 

impression of where he has been— the 
kitchen, the garden, or the sick-room. I 
gain pleasurable ideas of freshness and 
good taste from the odors of soap, toilet 
water, clean garments, woolen and silk 
stuffs, and gloves. 

I have not, indeed, the all-knowing 
scent of the hound or the wild animal. 
None but the halt and the blind need 
fear my skill in pursuit; for there are 
other things besides water, stale trails, 
confusing cross tracks to put me at 
fault. Nevertheless, human odors are 
as varied and capable of recognition as 
hands and faces. The dear odors of 
those I love are so definite, so unmistak- 
able, that nothing can quite obliterate 
them. If many years should elapse be- 
fore I saw an intimate friend again, I 
think I should recognize his odor in- 
stantly in the heart of Africa, as 
73 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

promptly as would my brother that 
barks. 

Once, long ago, in a crowded railway 
station, a lady kissed me as she hurried 
by. I had not touched even her dress. 
But she left a scent with her kiss which 
gave me a glimpse of her. The years 
are many since she kissed me. Yet her 
odor is fresh in my memory. 

It is difficult to put into words the 
thing itself, the elusive person-odor. 
There seems to be no adequate vocabu- 
lary of smells, and I must fall back on 
approximate phrase and metaphor. 

Some people have a vague, unsub- 
stantial odor that floats about, mocking 
every' effort to identify it. It is the will- 
o'-the-wisp of my olfactive experience. 
Sometimes I meet one who lacks a dis- 
tinctive person-scent, and I seldom find' 
such a one lively or entertaining. On 
74 



SMELL, THE FALLEN ANGEL 

the other hand, one who has a pungent 
odor often possesses great vitality, en- 
ergy, and vigor of mind. 

Masculine exhalations are as a rule 
stronger, more vivid, more widely dif- 
ferentiated than those of women. In 
the odor of young men there is some- 
thing elemental, as of fire, storm, and 
salt sea. It pulsates with buoyancy and 
desire. It suggests all things strong 
and beautiful and joyous, and gives me 
a sense of physical happiness. I wonder 
if others observe that all infants have 
the same scent— pure, simple, unde- 
cipherable as their dormant personality. 
It is not until the age of six or seven 
that they begin to have perceptible indi- 
vidual odors. These develop and ma- 
ture along with their mental and bodily 
powers. 

What I have written about smell, es- 
75 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

pecially person-smell, will perhaps be 
regarded as the abnormal sentiment of 
one who can have no idea of the "world 
of reality and beauty which the eye per- 
ceives." There are people who are 
color-blind, people who' are tone-deaf. 
Most people are smell-blind-and-deaf. 
We should not condemn a musical com- 
position on the testimony of an ear 
which cannot distinguish one chord from 
another, or judge a picture by the ver- 
dict of a color-blind critic. The sensa- 
tions of smell which cheer, inform, and 
broaden my life are not less pleasant 
merely because some critic who treads 
the wide, bright pathway of the eye has 
not cultivated his olfactive sense. 
Without the shy, fugitive, often unob- 
served, sensations and the certainties 
which taste, smell, and touch give me, I 
should be obliged to take my conception 
76 



SMELL, THE FALLEN ANGEL 

of the universe wholly from others. I 
should lack the alchemy by which I now 
infuse into my world light, color, and 
the Protean spark. The sensuous real- 
ity which interthreads and supports all 
the gropings of my imagination would 
be shattered. The solid earth would 
melt from under my feet and disperse 
itself in space. The objects dear to my 
hands would become formless, dead 
things, and I should walk among them 
as among invisible ghosts. 



77 



VII 

RELATIVE VALUES OF THE SENSES 

Iwas once without the sense of smell 
and taste for several days. It seemed 
incredible, this utter detachment from 
odors, to breathe the air in and observe 
never a single scent. The feeling was 
probably similar, though less in degree, 
to that of one who first loses sight 
and cannot but expect to see the light 
again any day, any minute. I knew I 
should smell again some time. Still, 
after the wonder had passed off, a lone- 
liness crept over me as vast as the air 
whose myriad odors I missed. The 
multitudinous subtle delights that smell 
makes mine became for a time wistful 
78 



RELATIVE VALUES OF THE SENSES 

memories. When I recovered the lost 
sense, my heart bounded with gladness. 
It is a fine dramatic touch that Hans 
Andersen gives to the story of Kay and 
Gerda in the passage about flowers. 
Kay, whom the wicked magician's glass 
has blinded to human love, rushes away 
fiercely from home when he discovers 
that the roses have lost their sweetness. 
The loss of smell for a few days gave 
me a clearer idea than I had ever had 
what it is to be blinded suddenly, help- 
lessly. \ With a little stretch of the im- 
agination I knew then what it must be 
when the great curtain shuts out sud- 
denly the light of day, the stars, and 
the firmament itself. I see the blind 
man's eyes strain for the light, as he 
fearfully tries to walk his old rounds, 
until the unchanging blank that every- 
where spreads before him stamps the 
79 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

reality of the dark upon his conscious- 
ness. 

My temporary loss of smell proved 
to me, too, that the absence of a sense 
need not dull the mental faculties and 
does not distort one's view of the world, 
and so I reason that blindness and 
deafness need not pervert the inner or- 
der of the intellect. I know that if 
there were no odors for me I should still 
possess a considerable part of the world. 
Novelties and surprises would abound, 
adventures would thicken in the dark. 

In my classification of the senses, 
smell is a little the ear's inferior, and 
touch is a great deal the eye's superior. 
I find that great artists and philoso- 
phers agree with' me in this. Diderot 
says: 

Je trouvais que de tous les sens, l'oeil etait 
le plus superficiel; l'oreille, le plus orgueil- 
leux; l'odorat, le plus voluptueux; le gout, 
80 



RELATIVE VALUES OF THE SENSES 

le plus superstitieux et le plus inconstant; le 
toucher, le plus profond et le plus philosophe. 1 

A friend whom I have never seen 
sends me a quotation from Symonds's 
"Renaissance in Italy" : 

Lorenzo Ghiberti, after describing a piece 
of antique sculpture he saw in Rome adds, 
"To express the perfection of learning, mas- 
tery, and art displayed in it is beyond the 
power of language. Its more exquisite beau- 
ties could not be discovered by the sight, but 
only by the touch of the hand passed over it." 
Of another classic marble at Padua he says, 
"This statue, when the Christian faith tri- 
umphed, was hidden in that place by some 
gentle soul, who, seeing it so perfect, fash- 
ioned with art so wonderful, and with such 
power of genius, and being moved to reverent 
pity, caused a sepulchre of bricks to be built, 
and there within buried the statue, and cov- 

1 1 found that of the senses, the eye is the most super- 
ficial, the ear the most arrogant, smell the most volup- 
tuous, taste the most superstitious and fickle, touch the 
most profound and the most philosophical. 

6 81 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 



ered it with a broad slab of stone, that it 
might not in any way be injured. It has 
very many sweet beauties which the eyes 
alone can comprehend not, either by strong 
or tempered light; only the hand by touch- 
ing them finds them out." 

Hold out your hands to feel the lux- 
ury of the sunbeams. Press the soft 
blossoms against your cheek, and finger 
their graces of form, their delicate mu- 
tability of shape, their pliancy and 
freshness. Expose your face to the 
aerial floods that sweep the heavens, 
"inhale great draughts of space," won- 
der, wonder at the wind's unwearied 
activity. Pile note on note the infinite 
music that flows increasingly to your 
soul from the tactual sonorities of a 
thousand branches and tumbling wa- 
ters. How can the world be shriveled 
when this most profound, emotional 
82 



RELATIVE VALUES OF THE SENSES 

sense, touch, is faithful to its service ? I 
am sure that if a fairy bade me choose 
between the sense of sight and that of 
touch, I would not part with the warm, 
endearing contact of human hands or 
the wealth of form, the mobility and 
fullness that press into my palms. 



VIII 

THE FIVE-SENSED WORLD 

The poets have taught us how full 
of wonders is the night; and the 
night of blindness has its wonders, too. 
The only lightless dark is the night of 
ignorance and insensibility. We differ, 
blind and seeing, one from another, not 
in our senses, but in the use we make of 
them, in the imagination and courage 
with which we seek wisdom beyond our 
senses. 

It is more difficult to teach ignorance 
to think than to teach an intelligent 
blind man to see the grandeur of Niag- 
ara. I have walked with people whose 
eyes are full of light, but who see noth- 
84 



THE FIVE-SENSED WORLD 

ing in wood, sea, or sky, nothing in city 
streets, nothing in books. What a wit- 
less masquerade is this seeing! It were 
better far to sail forever in the night of 
blindness, with sense and feeling and 
mind, than to be thus content with the 
mere act of seeing. They have the sun- 
set, the morning skies, the purple of dis- 
tant hills, yet their souls voyage through 
this enchanted world with a barren 
stare. 

The calamity of the blind is immense, 
irreparable. But it does not take away 
our share of the things that count— ser- 
vice, friendship, humor, imagination, 
wisdom. It is the secret inner will that 
controls one's fate. We are capable of 
willing to be good, of loving and being 
loved, of thinking to the end that we may 
be wiser. We possess these spirit-born 
forces equally with all God's children. 
85 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

Therefore we, too, see the lightnings 
and hear the thunders of Sinai. We, 
too, march through the wilderness and 
the solitary place that shall be glad 
for us, and as we pass, God maketh the 
desert to blossom like the rose. We, too, 
go in unto the Promised Land to pos- 
sess the treasures of the spirit, the un- 
seen permanence of life and nature. 

The blind man of spirit faces the un- 
known and grapples with it, and what 
else does the world of seeing men do? 
He has imagination, sympathy, human- 
ity, and these ineradicable existences 
compel him to share by a sort of proxy 
in a sense he has not. When he meets 
terms of color, light, physiognomy, he 
guesses, divines, puzzles out their mean- 
ing by analogies drawn from the senses 
he has. I naturally tend to think, rea- 
son, draw inferences as if I had five 



THE FIVE-SENSED WORLD 

senses instead of three. This tendency- 
is beyond my control; it is involuntary, 
habitual, instinctive. I cannot compel 
my mind to say "I feel" instead of "I 
see" or "I hear." The word "feel" 
proves on examination to be no less a 
convention than "see" and "hear" when 
I seek for words accurately to describe 
the outward things that affect my three 
bodily senses. When a man loses a leg, 
his brain persists in impelling him to 
use what he has not and yet feels to be 
there. Can it be that the brain is so con- 
stituted that it will continue the activ- 
ity which animates the sight and the 
hearing, after the eye and the ear have 
been destroyed? 

It might seem that the five senses 

would work intelligently together only 

when resident in the same body. Yet 

when two or three are left unaided, they 

87 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

reach out for their complements in an- 
other body, and find that they yoke 
easily with the borrowed team. When 
my hand aches from overtouching, I 
find relief in the sight of another, 
When my mind lags, wearied with the 
strain of forcing out thoughts about 
dark, musicless, colorless, detached sub- 
stance, it recovers its elasticity as soon 
as I resort to the powers of another 
mind which commands light, harmony, 
color. Now, if the five senses will not 
remain disassociated, the life of the 
deaf -blind cannot be severed from the 
life of the seeing, hearing race. 

The deaf -blind person may be 
plunged and replunged like Schiller's 
diver into seas of the unknown. But, 
unlike the doomed hero, he returns tri- 
umphant, grasping the priceless truth 

that his mind is not crippled, not limited 
88 



THE FIVE-SENSED WORLD 

to the infirmity of his senses. The 
world of the eye and the ear becomes to 
him a subject of fateful interest. He 
seizes every word of sight and hearing 
because his sensations compel it. Light 
and color, of which he has no tactual evi- 
dence, he studies fearlessly, believing 
that all humanly knowable truth is open 
to him. He is in a position similar to 
that of the astronomer who, firm, pa- 
tient, watches a star night after night 
for many years and feels rewarded if he 
discovers a single fact about it. The 
man deaf-blind to ordinary outward 
things, and the man deaf -blind to the 
immeasurable universe, are both limited 
by time and space ; but they have made 
a compact to wring service from their 
limitations. 

The bulk of the world's knowledge is 
an imaginary construction. History is 
89 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

but a mode of imagining, of making us 
see civilizations that no longer appear 
upon the earth. Some of the most sig- 
nificant discoveries in modern science 
owe their origin to the imagination of 
men who had neither accurate know- 
ledge nor exact instruments to demon- 
strate their beliefs. If astronomy had 
not kept always in advance of the tele- 
scope, no one would ever have thought 
a telescope worth making. What great 
invention has not existed in the inven- 
tor's mind long before he gave it tangi- 
ble shape ? 

A more splendid example of imagin- 
ative knowledge is the unity with which 
philosophers start their study of the 
world. They can never perceive the 
world in its entire reality. Yet their 
imagination, with its magnificent allow- 
ance for error, its power of treating un- 
90 



THE FIVE-SENSED WORLD 

certainty as negligible, has pointed the 
way for empirical knowledge. 

In their highest creative moments the 
great poet, the great musician cease to 
use the crude instruments of sight and 
hearing. They break away from their 
sense-moorings, rise on strong, compel- 
ling wings of spirit far above our misty 
hills and darkened valleys into the re- 
gion of light, music, intellect. 

What eye hath seen the glories of the 
New Jerusalem? What ear hath heard 
the music of the spheres, the steps of 
time, the strokes of chance, the blows of 
death? Men have not heard with their 
physical sense the tumult of sweet 
voices above the hills of Judea nor seen 
the heavenly vision; but millions have 
listened to that spiritual message 
through many ages. 

Our blindness changes not a whit the 
91 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

course of inner realities. Of us it is 
as true as it is of the seeing that the 
most beautiful world is always entered 
through the imagination. If you wish 
to be something that you are not, — 
something fine, noble, good, — you shut 
your eyes, and for one dreamy moment 
you are that which you long to be. 



92 



IX 

INWARD VISIONS 

A ccording to all art, all nature, all co- 
-£jL herent human thought, we know 
that order, proportion, form, are es- 
sential elements of beauty. Now order, 
proportion, and form, are palpable to 
the touch. But beauty and rhythm are 
deeper than sense. They are like love 
and faith. They spring out of a spirit- 
ual process only slightly dependent 
upon sensations. Order, proportion, 
form, cannot generate in the mind the 
abstract idea of beauty, unless there is 
already a soul intelligence to breathe 
life into the elements. Many persons, 
93 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

having perfect eyes, are blind in their 
perceptions. Many persons, having 
perfect ears, are emotionally deaf. Yet 
these are the very ones who dare to set 
limits to the vision of those who, lack- 
ing a sense or two, have will, soul, pas- 
sion, imagination. Faith is a mockery 
if it teaches us not that we may con- 
struct a world unspeakably more com- 
plete and beautiful than the material 
world. And I, too, may construct my 
better world, for I am a child of God, 
an inheritor of a fragment of the Mind 
that created all worlds. 

There is a consonance of all things, a 
blending of all that we know about the 
material world and the spiritual. It 
consists for me of all the impressions, vi- 
brations, heat, cold, taste, smell, and the 
sensations which these convey to the 

mind, infinitely combined, interwoven 
94 



INWARD VISIONS 



with associated ideas and acquired 
knowledge. No thoughtful person will 
believe that what I said about the mean- 
ings of footsteps is strictly true of mere 
jolts and jars. It is an array of the 
spiritual in certain natural elements, 
tactual beats, and an acquired knowledge 
of physical habits and moral traits of 
highly organized human beings. What 
would odors signify if they were not as- 
sociated with the time of the year, the 
place I live in, and the people I know? 

The result of such a blending is some- 
times a discordant trying of strings far 
removed from a melody, very far from 
a symphony. (For the benefit of those 
who must be reassured, I will say that I 
have felt a musician tuning his violin, 
that I have read about a symphony, and 
so have a fair intellectual perception of 
my metaphor.) But with training and 
95 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 



experience the faculties gather up the 
stray notes and combine them into a 
full, harmonious whole. If the person 
who accomplishes this task is peculiarly 
gifted, we call him a poet. The blind 
and the deaf are not great poets, it is 
true. Yet now and again you find one 
deaf and blind who has attained to his 
royal kingdom of beauty. 

I have a little volume of poems by a 
deaf -blind lady, Madame Bertha Ga- 
leron. Her poetry has versatility of 
thought. Now it is tender and sweet, 
now full of tragic passion and the stern- 
ness of destiny. Victor Hugo called 
her "La Grande Voyante." She has 
written several plays, two of which 
have been acted in Paris. The French 
Academy has crowned her work. 

The infinite wonders of the universe 
are revealed to us in exact measure as 
96 



INWARD VISIONS 



we are capable of receiving them. The 
keenness of our vision depends not on 
how much we can see, but on how much 
we feel. Nor yet does mere know- 
ledge create beauty. Nature sings her 
most exquisite songs to those who love 
her. She does not unfold her secrets to 
those who come only to gratify their de- 
sire of analysis, to gather facts, but to 
those who see in her manifold phenom- 
ena suggestions of lofty, delicate senti- 
ments. 

Am I to be denied the use of such ad- 
jectives as "freshness" and "sparkle," 
"dark" and "gloomy"? I have walked 
in the fields at early morning. I have 
felt a rose-bush laden with dew and fra- 
grance. I have felt the curves and 
graces of my kitten at play. I have 
known the sweet, shy ways of little chil- 
dren. I have known the sad opposites 

7 97 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

of all these, a ghastly touch picture. 
Remember, I have sometimes traveled 
over a dusty road as far as my feet 
could go. At a sudden turn I have 
stepped upon starved, ignoble weeds, 
and reaching out my hands, I have 
touched a fair tree out of which a para- 
site had taken the life like a vampire. I 
have touched a pretty bird whose soft 
wings hung limp, whose little heart beat 
no more. I have wept over the feeble- 
ness and deformity of a child, lame, or 
born blind, or, worse still, mindless. If 
I had the genius of Thomson, I, too, 
could depict a "City of Dreadful 
Night" from mere touch sensations. 
From contrasts so irreconcilable can we 
fail to form an idea of beauty and know 
surely when we meet with loveliness? 
Here is a sonnet eloquent of a blind 

man's power of vision : 
98 



INWARD VISIONS 



THE MOUNTAIN TO THE PINE 

Thou tall, majestic monarch of the wood, 
That standest where no wild vines dare to 

creep, 
Men call thee old, and say that thou hast 

stood 
A century upon my rugged steep ; 

Yet unto me thy life is but a day, 

When I recall the things that I have seen, — 
The forest monarchs that have passed away 
Upon the spot where first I saw thy green ; 

For I am older than the age of man, 

Or all the living things that crawl or creep, 
Or birds of air, or creatures of the deep ; 

I was the first dim outline of God's plan : 
Only the waters of the restless sea 
And the infinite stars in heaven are old to 
me. 

I am glad my friend Mr. Stedman 

knew that poem while he was making 

his Anthology, for knowing it, so fine a 

poet and critic could not fail to give it a 

99 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

place in his treasure-house of Ameri- 
can poetry. The poet, Mr. Clarence 
Hawkes, has been blind since childhood ; 
yet he finds in nature hints of combina- 
tions for his mental pictures. Out of 
the knowledge and impressions that 
come to him he constructs a masterpiece 
which hangs upon the walls of his 
thought. And into the poet's house 
come all the true spirits of the world. 

It was a rare poet who thought of the 
mountain as "the first dim outline of 
God's plan." That is the real wonder 
of the poem, and not that a blind man 
should speak so confidently of sky and 
sea. Our ideas of the sky are an accu- 
mulation of touch-glimpses, literary al- 
lusions, and the observations of others, 
with an emotional blending of all. My 

face feels only a tiny portion of the at- 
100 



INWARD VISIONS 



mosphere ; but I go through continuous 

space and feel the air at every point, 

every instant. I have been told about 

the distances from our earth to the sun, 

to the other planets, and to the fixed 

stars. I multiply a thousand times the 

utmost height and width that my touch 

compasses, and thus I gain a deep sense 

of the sky's immensity. 

Move me along constantly over 

water, water, nothing but water, and 

you give me the solitude, the vastness 

of ocean which fills the eye. I have 

been in a little sail-boat on the sea, when 

the rising tide swept it toward the 

shore. May I not understand the poet's 

figure: "The green of spring overflows 

the earth like a tide?" I have felt the 

flame of a candle blow and flutter in the 

breeze. May I not, then, say: "Myriads 
101 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

of fireflies flit hither and thither in 
the dew-wet grass like little fluttering 
tapers"? 

Combine the endless space of air, the 
sun's warmth, the prevalence of fitful 
odors, the clouds that are described to 
my understanding spirit, the frequent 
breaking through the soil of a brook or 
the expanse of the wind-ruffled lake, the 
tactual undulation of the hills, which I 
recall when I am far away from them, 
the towering trees upon trees as I walk 
by them, the bearings that I try to keep 
while others tell me the directions of the 
various points of the scenery, and you 
will begin to feel surer of my mental 
landscape. The utmost bound to which 
my thought will go with clearness is the 
horizon of my mind. From this horizon 
I imagine the one which the eye marks. 

Touch cannot bridge distance,— it is 
102 



INWARD VISIONS 



fit only for the contact of surfaces, — 
but thought leaps the chasm. For this 
reason I am able to use words descrip- 
tive of objects distant from my senses. 
I have felt the rondure of the infant's 
tender form. I can apply this percep- 
tion to the landscape and to the far-off 
hills. 



103 



X 

ANALOGIES IN SENSE PERCEPTION 

Ihave not touched the outline of a 
star nor the glory of the moon, but 
I believe that God has set two lights in 
my mind, the greater to rule by day and 
the lesser by night, and by them I know 
that I am able to navigate my life-bark, 
as certain of reaching the haven as he 
who steers by the North Star. Perhaps 
my sun shines not as yours. The colors 
that glorify my world, the blue of the 
sky, the green of the fields, may not cor- 
respond exactly with those you delight 
in; but they are none the less color to 
me. The sun does not shine for my 

physical eyes, nor does the lightning 
104 



ANALOGIES IN SENSE PERCEPTION 

flash, nor do the trees turn green in the 
spring; but they have not therefore 
ceased to exist, any more than the land- 
scape is annihilated when you turn your 
back on it. 

I understand how scarlet can differ 
from crimson because I know that the 
smell of an orange is not the smell of 
a grape-fruit. I can also conceive that 
colors have shades, and guess what 
shades are. In smell and taste there are 
varieties not broad enough to be funda- 
mental; so I call them shades. There 
are half a dozen roses near me. They 
all have the unmistakable rose scent ; yet 
my nose tells me that they are not the 
same. The American Beauty is dis- 
tinct from the Jacqueminot and La 
France. Odors in certain grasses fade 
as really to my sense as certain colors do 

to yours in the sun. The freshness of a 
105 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

flower in my hand is analogous to the 
freshness I taste in an apple newly 
picked. I make use of analogies like 
these to enlarge my conceptions of 
colors. Some analogies which I draw 
between qualities in surface and vibra- 
tion, taste and smell, are drawn by 
others between sight, hearing, and 
touch. This fact encourages me to per- 
severe, to try to bridge the gap between 
the eye and the hand. 

Certainly I get far enough to sympa- 
thize with the delight that my kind feel 
in beauty they see and harmony they 
hear. This bond between humanity and 
me is worth keeping, even if the ideas on 
which I base it prove erroneous. 

Sweet, beautiful vibrations exist for 

my touch, even though they travel 

through other substances than air to 

reach me. So I imagine sweet, delight- 

106 



ANALOGIES IN SENSE PERCEPTION 

f ul sounds, and the artistic arrangement 
of them which is called music, and I re- 
member that they travel through the air 
to the ear, conveying impressions some- 
what like mine. I also know what tones 
are, since they are perceptible tactually 
in a voice. Now, heat varies greatly in 
the sun, in the fire, in hands, and in the 
fur of animals; indeed, there is such a 
thing for me as a cold sun. So I think 
of the varieties of light that touch the 
eye, cold and warm, vivid and dim, soft 
and glaring, but always light, and I 
imagine their passage through the air 
to an extensive sense, instead of to a 
narrow one like touch. From the ex- 
perience I have had with voices I guess 
how the eye distinguishes shades in the 
midst of light. While I read the lips of 
a woman whose voice is soprano, I note 
a low tone or a glad tone in the midst of 
107 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

a high, flowing voice. When I feel my 
cheeks hot, I know that I am red. I 
have talked so much and read so much 
about colors that through no will of my 
own I attach meanings to them, just as 
all people attach certain meanings to 
abstract terms like hope, idealism, 
monotheism, intellect, which cannot be 
represented truly by visible objects, but 
which are understood from analogies be- 
tween immaterial concepts and the 
ideas they awaken of external things. 
The force of association drives me to 
say that white is exalted and pure, green 
is exuberant, red suggests love or shame 
or strength. Without the color or its 
equivalent, life to me would be dark, 
barren, a vast blackness. 

Thus through an inner law of com- 
pleteness my thoughts are not permitted 

to remain colorless. It strains my mind 
108 



ANALOGIES IN SENSE PERCEPTION 

to separate color and sound from ob- 
jects. Since my education began I have 
always had things described to me with 
their colors and sounds by one with keen 
senses and a fine feeling for the signifi- 
cant. Therefore I habitually think of 
things as colored and resonant. Habit 
accounts for part. The soul sense ac- 
counts for another part. The brain with 
its five-sensed construction asserts its 
right and accounts for the rest. Inclu- 
sive of all, the unity of the world de- 
mands that color be kept in it, whether I 
have cognizance of it or not. Rather 
than be shut out, I take part in it by dis- 
cussing it, imagining it, happy in the 
happiness of those near me who gaze at 
the lovely hues of the sunset or the rain- 
bow. 

My hand has its share in this multiple 
knowledge, but it must never be f orgot- 
109 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

ten that with the fingers I see only a 
very small portion of a surface, and that 
I must pass my hand continually over it 
before my touch grasps the whole. It 
is still more important, however, to re- 
member that my imagination is not 
tethered to certain points, locations, and 
distances. It puts all the parts together 
simultaneously as if it saw or knew in- 
stead of feeling them. Though I feel 
only a small part of my horse at a time, 
— my horse is nervous and does not sub- 
mit to manual explorations, — yet, be- 
cause I have many times felt hock, nose, 
hoof and mane, I can see the steeds of 
Phoebus Apollo coursing the heavens. 

With such a power active it is impos- 
sible that my thought should be vague, 
indistinct. It must needs be potent, 
definite. This is really a corollary of 
the philosophical truth that the real 
110 



ANALOGIES IN SENSE PERCEPTION 

world exists only for the mind. That is 
to say, I can never touch the world in its 
entirety; indeed, I touch less of it than 
the portion that others see or hear. But 
all creatures, all objects, pass into my 
brain entire, and occupy the same extent 
there that they do in material space. I 
declare that for me branched thoughts, 
instead of pines, wave, sway, rustle, 
make musical the ridges of mountains 
rising summit upon summit. Mention 
a rose too far away for me to smell it. 
Straightway a scent steals into my nos- 
tril, a form presses against my palm in 
all its dilating softness, with rounded 
petals, slightly curled edges, curving 
stem, leaves drooping. When I would 
fain view the world as a whole, it rushes 
into vision — man, beast, bird, reptile, 
fly, sky, ocean, mountains, plain, rock, 
pebble. The warmth of life, the reality 
111 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

of creation is over all— the throb of 
human hands, glossiness of fur, lithe 
windings of long bodies, poignant buzz- 
ing of insects, the ruggedness of the 
steeps as I climb them, the liquid mobil- 
ity and boom of waves upon the rocks. 
Strange to say, try as I may, I cannot 
force my touch to pervade this universe 
in all directions. The moment I try, the 
whole vanishes; only small objects or 
narrow portions of a surface, mere 
touch-signs, a chaos of things scattered 
at random, remain. No thrill, no de- 
light is excited thereby. Restore to the 
artistic, comprehensive internal sense its 
rightful domain, and you give me joy 
which best proves the reality. 



112 



XI 

BEFORE THE SOUL DAWN 

Before my teacher came to me, I did 
1 not know that I am. I lived in a 
world that was a no-world. I cannot 
hope to describe adequately that uncon- 
scious, yet conscious time of nothing- 
ness. I did not know that I knew 
aught, or that I lived or acted or de- 
sired. I had neither will nor intellect. 
I was carried along to objects and acts 
by a certain blind natural impetus. I 
had a mind which caused me to feel 
anger, satisfaction, desire. These two 
facts led those about me to suppose that 
I willed and thought. I can remember 
all this, not because I knew that it was 
8 113 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

so, but because I have tactual memory. 
It enables me to remember that I never 
contracted my forehead in the act of 
thinking. I never viewed anything be- 
forehand or chose it. I also recall tactu- 
ally the fact that never in a start of the 
body or a heart-beat did I feel that I 
loved or cared for anything. My inner 
life, then, was a blank without past, 
present, or future, without hope or an- 
ticipation, without wonder or joy or 
faith. 

It was not night — it was not day. 

But vacancy absorbing space, 

iAnd fixedness, without a place ; 

There were no stars — no earth — no time — 

No check — no change — no good — no crime. 

My dormant being had no idea of 
God or immortality, no fear of death. 
114 



BEFORE THE SOUL DAWN 

I remember, also through touch, that 
I had a power of association. I felt- 
tactual jars like the stamp of a foot, the 
opening of a window or its closing, the 
slam of a door. After repeatedly smell- 
ing rain and feeling the discomfort of 
wetness, I acted like those about me: I 
ran to shut the window. But that was 
not thought in any sense. It was the 
same kind of association that makes ani- 
mals take shelter from the rain. From 
the same instinct of aping others, I 
folded the clothes that came from the 
laundry, and put mine away, fed the 
turkeys, sewed bead-eyes on my doll's 
face, and did many other things of 
which I have the tactual remembrance. 
When I wanted anything I liked, — ice- 
cream, for instance, of which I was very 
fond, — I had a delicious taste on my 
tongue (which, by the way, I never have 
115 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

now) , and in my hand I felt the turning 
of the freezer. I made the sign, and my 
mother knew I wanted ice-cream. I 
"thought" and desired in my fingers. 
If I had made a man, I should certainly 
have put the brain and soul in his finger- 
tips. From reminiscences like these I 
conclude that it is the opening of the 
two faculties, freedom of will, or choice, 
and rationality, or the power of think- 
ing from one thing to another, which 
makes it possible to come into being first 
as a child, afterward as a man. 

Since I had no power of thought, I 
did not compare one mental state with 
another. So I was not conscious of any 
change or process going on in my brain 
when my teacher began to instruct me. 
I merely felt keen delight in obtaining 
more easily what I wanted by means of 
the finger motions she taught me. I 
116 



BEFORE THE SOUL DAWN 

thought only of objects, and only ob- 
jects I wanted. It was the turning of 
the freezer on a larger scale. When I 
learned the meaning of "I" and "me" 
and found that I was something, I 
began to think. Then consciousness 
first existed for me. Thus it was not 
the sense of touch that brought me 
knowledge. It was the awakening of 
my soul that first rendered my senses 
their value, their cognizance of ob- 
jects, names, qualities, and properties. 
Thought made me conscious of love, 
joy, and all the emotions. I was eager 
to know, then to understand, afterward 
to reflect on what I knew and under- 
stood, and the blind impetus, which had 
before driven me hither and thither at 
the dictates of my sensations, vanished 
forever. 

I cannot represent more clearly than 
117 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

any one else the gradual and subtle 
changes from first impressions to ab- 
stract ideas. But I know that my 
physical ideas, that is, ideas derived 
from material objects, appear to me 
first in ideas similar to those of touch. 
Instantly they pass into intellectual 
meanings. Afterward the meaning 
finds expression in what is called "inner 
speech." When I was a child, my inner 
speech was inner spelling. Although I 
am even now frequently caught spell- 
ing to myself on my fingers, yet I talk 
to myself, too, with my lips, and it is 
true that when I first learned to speak, 
my mind discarded the finger-symbols 
and began to articulate. However, 
when I try to recall what some one has 
said to me, I am conscious of a hand 
spelling into mine. 

It has often been asked what were 
118 



BEFORE THE SOUL DAWN 

my earliest impressions of the world in 
which I found myself. But one who 
thinks at all of his first impressions knows 
what a riddle this is. Our impressions 
grow and change unnoticed, so that 
what we suppose we thought as children 
may be quite different from what we 
actually experienced in our childhood. 
I only know that after my education 
began the world which came within my 
reach was all alive. I spelled to my 
blocks and my dogs. I sympathized 
with plants when the flowers were 
picked, because I thought it hurt them, 
and that they grieved for their lost blos- 
soms. It was years before I could be 
made to believe that my dogs did not 
understand what I said, and I always 
apologized to them when I ran into or 
stepped on them. 

As my experiences broadened and 
119 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 



deepened, the indeterminate, poetic 
feelings of childhood began to fix them- 
selves in definite thoughts. Nature — 
the world I could touch— was folded 
and filled with myself. I am inclined to 
believe those philosophers who declare 
that we know nothing but our own feel- 
ings and ideas. With a little ingenious 
reasoning one may see in the material 
world simply a mirror, an image of per- 
manent mental sensations. In either 
sphere self-knowledge is the condition 
and the limit of our consciousness. That 
is why, perhaps, many people know 
so little about what is beyond their 
short range of experience. They look 
within themselves — and find nothing! 
Therefore they conclude that there is 
nothing outside themselves, either. 

However that may be, I came later to 
look for an image of my emotions and 
120 



BEFORE THE SOUL DAWN 

sensations in others. I had to learn the 
outward signs of inward feelings. The 
start of fear, the suppressed, controlled 
tensity of pain, the beat of happy mus- 
cles in others, had to be perceived and 
compared with my own experiences be- 
fore I could trace them back to the in- 
tangible soul of another. Groping, un- 
certain, I at last found my identity, and 
after seeing my thoughts and feelings 
repeated in others, I gradually con- 
structed my world of men and of God. 
As I read and study, I find that this is 
what the rest of the race has done. Man 
looks within himself and in time finds 
the measure and the meaning of the uni- 
verse. 



121 



XII 

THE LARGER SANCTIONS 

So, in the midst of life, eager, im- 
perious life, the deaf -blind child, 
fettered to the bare rock of circum- 
stance, spider-like, sends out gossamer 
threads of thought into the measureless 
void that surrounds him. Patiently he 
explores the dark, until he builds up a 
knowledge of the world he lives in, and 
his soul meets the beauty of the world, 
where the sun shines always, and the 
birds sing. To the blind child the dark 
is kindly. In it he finds nothing extra- 
ordinary or terrible. It is his familiar 
world; even the groping from place to 
place, the halting steps, the dependence 
122 



THE LARGER SANCTIONS 

upon others, do not seem strange to him. 
He does not know how many countless 
pleasures the dark shuts out from him. 
Not until he weighs his life in the scale 
of others' experience does he realize 
what it is to live forever in the dark. 
But the knowledge that teaches him this 
bitterness also brings its consolation— 
spiritual light, the promise of the day 
that shall be. 

The blind child— the deaf -blind child 
— has inherited the mind of seeing and 
hearing ancestors — a mind measured to 
five senses. Therefore he must be influ- 
enced, even if it be unknown to himself, 
by the light, color, song which have been 
transmitted through the language he is 
taught, for the chambers of the mind 
are ready to receive that language. The 
brain of the race is so permeated with 
color that it dyes even the speech of the 
123 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

blind. Every object I think of is 
stained with the hue that belongs to it 
by association and memory. The ex- 
perience of the deaf -blind person, in a 
world of seeing, hearing people, is like 
that of a sailor on an island where the 
inhabitants speak a language unknown 
to him, whose life is unlike that he has 
lived. He is one, they are many; there 
is no chance of compromise. He must 
learn to see with their eyes, to hear with 
their ears, to think their thoughts, to 
follow their ideals. 

If the dark, silent world which sur- 
rounds him were essentially different 
from the sunlit, resonant world, it would 
be incomprehensible to his kind, and 
could never be discussed. If his feel- 
ings and sensations were fundamentally 
different from those of others, they 
would be inconceivable except to those 
124 



THE LARGER SANCTIONS 

who had similar sensations and feelings. 
If the mental consciousness of the deaf- 
blind person were absolutely dissimilar 
to that of his fellows, he would have no 
means of imagining what they think. 
Since the mind of the sightless is essen- 
tially the same as that of the seeing in 
that it admits of no lack, it must supply 
some sort of equivalent for missing phy- 
sical sensations. It must perceive a like- 
ness between things outward and things 
inward, a correspondence between the 
seen and the unseen. I make use of 
such a correspondence in many rela- 
tions, and no matter how far I pursue 
it to things I cannot see, it does not 
break under the test. 

As a working hypothesis, correspond- 
ence is adequate to all life, through the 
whole range of phenomena. The flash of 
thought and its swiftness explain the 
125 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

lightning flash and the sweep of a comet 
through the heavens. My mental sky 
opens to me the vast celestial spaces, and 
I proceed to fill them with the images of 
my spiritual stars. I recognize truth by 
the clearness and guidance that it gives 
my thought, and, knowing what that 
clearness is, I can imagine what light is 
to the eye. It is not a convention of 
language, but a forcible feeling of the 
reality, that at times makes me start 
when I say, "Oh, I see my mistake!" or 
"How dark, cheerless is his life!" I 
know these are metaphors. Still, I must 
prove with them, since there is nothing 
in our language to replace them. Deaf- 
blind metaphors to correspond do not 
exist and are not necessary. Because 
I can understand the word "reflect" 
figuratively, a mirror has never per- 
plexed me. The manner in which my 
126 




Copynght, 1907, by The Whitman Studio 

The Medallion 

The bas-relief on the wall is a portrait of the Queen Dowager 
of Spain which Her Majesty had made for Miss Keller 



THE LARGER SANCTIONS 

imagination perceives absent things en- 
ables me to see how glasses can magnify 
things, bring them nearer, or remove 
them farther. 

Deny me this correspondence, this in- 
ternal sense, confine me to the fragmen- 
tary, incoherent touch-world, and lo, I 
become as a bat which wanders about on 
the wing. Suppose I omitted all words 
of seeing, hearing, color, light, land- 
scape, the thousand phenomena, instru- 
ments and beauties connected with them. 
I should suffer a great diminution of 
the wonder and delight in attaining 
knowledge; also — more dreadful loss — 
my emotions would be blunted, so that I 
could not be touched by things unseen. 

Has anything arisen to disprove the 

adequacy of correspondence? Has any 

chamber of the blind man's brain been 

opened and found empty? Has any 

127 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 



psychologist explored the mind of the 
sightless and been able to say, "There is 
no sensation here?" 

I tread the solid earth; I breathe the 
scented air. Out of these two experi- 
ences I form numberless associations 
and correspondences. I observe, I feel, 
I think, I imagine. I associate the 
countless varied impressions, expe- 
riences, concepts. Out of these mate- 
rials Fancy, the cunning artisan of the 
brain, welds an image which the skeptic 
would deny me, because I cannot see 
with my physical eyes the changeful, 
lovely face of my thought-child. He 
would break the mind's mirror. This 
spirit-vandal would humble my soul and 
force me to bite the dust of material 
things. While I champ the bit of cir- 
cumstance, he scourges and goads me 
with the spur of fact. If I heeded him, 
128 



THE LARGER SANCTIONS 

the sweet-visaged earth would vanish 
into nothing, and I should hold in my 
hand nought but an aimless, soulless 
lump of dead matter. But although the 
body physical is rooted alive to the Pro- 
methean rock, the spirit-proud huntress 
of the air will still pursue the shining, 
open highways of the universe. 

Blindness has no limiting effect upon 
mental vision. My intellectual horizon 
is infinitely wide. The universe it en- 
circles is immeasurable. Would they 
who bid me keep within the narrow 
bound of my meager senses demand of 
Herschel that he roof his stellar universe 
and give us back Plato's solid firmament 
of glassy spheres? Would they com- 
mand Darwin from the grave and bid 
him blot out his geological time, give us 
back a paltry few thousand years ? Oh, 
the supercilious doubters! They ever 

9 129 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

strive to clip the upward daring wings 
of the spirit. 

A person deprived of one or more 
senses is not, as many seem to think, 
turned out into a trackless wilderness 
without landmark or guide. The blind 
man carries with him into his dark en- 
vironment all the faculties essential to 
the apprehension of the visible world 
whose door is closed behind him. He 
finds his surroundings everywhere homo- 
geneous with those of the sunlit w T orld; 
for there is an inexhaustible ocean of 
likenesses between the world within, and 
the world without, and these likenesses, 
these correspondences, he finds equal to 
every exigency his life offers. 

The necessity of some such thing as 
correspondence or symbolism appears 
more and more urgent as we consider 
the duties that religion and philosophy 
enjoin upon us. 

130 



THE LARGER SANCTIONS 

The blind are expected to read the 
Bible as a means of attaining spiritual 
happiness. Now, the Bible is filled 
throughout with references to clouds, 
stars, colors, and beauty, and often the 
mention of these is essential to the mean- 
ing of the parable or the message in 
which they occur. Here one must needs 
see the inconsistency of people who be- 
lieve in the Bible, and yet deny us a 
right to talk about what we do not see, 
and for that matter what they do not 
see, either. Who shall forbid my heart 
to sing: "Yea, he did fly upon the wings 
of the wind. He made darkness his 
secret place; His pavilion round about 
him were dark waters and thick clouds 
of the skies." 

Philosophy constantly points out the 
untrust worthiness of the five senses and 
the important work of reason which cor- 
rects the errors of sight and reveals its 
131 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

illusions. If we cannot depend on five 
senses, how much less may we rely on 
three! What ground have we for dis- 
carding light, sound, and color as an in- 
tegral part of our world? How are we 
to know that they have ceased to exist 
for us? We must take their reality for 
granted, even as the philosopher as- 
sumes the reality of the world without 
being able to see it physically as a whole. 
Ancient philosophy offers an argu- 
ment which seems still valid. There is 
in the blind as in the seeing an Absolute 
which gives truth to what we know to be 
true, order to what is orderly, beauty to 
the beautiful, touchableness to what is 
tangible. If this is granted, it follows 
that this Absolute is not imperfect, in- 
complete, partial. It must needs go be- 
yond the limited evidence of our sensa- 
tions, and also give light to what is in- 
132 



THE LARGER SANCTIONS 

visible, music to the musical that silence 
dulls. Thus mind itself compels us to 
acknowledge that we are in a world of 
intellectual order, beauty, and harmony. 
The essences, or absolutes of these ideas, 
necessarily dispel their opposites which 
belong with evil, disorder, and discord. 
Thus deafness and blindness do not ex- 
ist in the immaterial mind, which is philo- 
sophically the real world, but are ban- 
ished with the perishable material senses. 
Reality, of which visible things are the 
symbol, shines before my mind. While 
I walk about my chamber with unsteady 
steps, my spirit sweeps skyward on 
eagle wings and looks out with un- 
quenchable vision upon the world of 
eternal beauty. 



133 



XIII 

THE DREAM WORLD 

Everybody takes his own dreams se- 
riously, but yawns at the breakfast- 
table when somebody else begins to tell 
the adventures of the night before. I 
hesitate, therefore, to enter upon an ac- 
count of my dreams ; for it is a literary 
sin to bore the reader, and a scientific sin 
to report the facts of a far country with 
more regard to point and brevity than 
to complete and literal truth. The psy- 
chologists have trained a pack of theo- 
ries and facts which they keep in leash, 
like so many bulldogs, and which they 
let loose upon us whenever we depart 
from the strait and narrow path of 
134 



THE DREAM WORLD 



dream probability. One may not even 
tell an entertaining dream without be- 
ing suspected of having liberally edited 
it, — as if editing were one of the seven 
deadly sins, instead of a useful and 
honorable occupation! Be it under- 
stood, then, that I am discoursing at my 
own breakfast-table, and that no scien- 
tific man is present to trip the autocrat. 
I used to wonder why scientific men 
and others were always asking me about 
my dreams. But I am not surprised 
now, since I have discovered what some 
of them believe to be the ordinary wak- 
ing experience of one who is both deaf 
and blind. They think that I can know 
very little about objects even a few feet 
beyond the reach of my arms. Every- 
thing outside of myself, according to 
them, is a hazy blur. Trees, mountains, 
cities, the ocean, even the house I live in 
135 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

are but fairy fabrications, misty unreal- 
ities. Therefore it is assumed that my 
dreams should have peculiar interest for 
the man of science. In some undefined 
way it is expected that they should re- 
veal the world I dwell in to be flat, 
formless, colorless, without perspective, 
with little thickness and less solidity— a 
vast solitude of soundless space. But 
who shall put into words limitless, 
visionless, silent void ? One should be a 
disembodied spirit indeed to make any- 
thing out of such insubstantial experi- 
ences. A world, or a dream for that 
matter, to be comprehensible to us, 
must, I should think, have a warp of 
substance woven into the woof of fan- 
tasy. We cannot imagine even in 
dreams an object which has no counter- 
part in reality. Ghosts always resemble 
somebody, and if they do not appear 
136 



THE DREAM WORLD 



themselves, their presence is indicated 
by circumstances with which we are per- 
fectly familiar. 

During sleep we enter a strange, 
mysterious realm which science has 
thus far not explored. Beyond the 
border-line of slumber the investigator 
may not pass with his common-sense 
rule and test. Sleep with softest touch 
locks all the gates of our physical senses 
and lulls to rest the conscious will 
— the disciplinarian of our waking 
thoughts. Then the spirit wrenches it- 
self free from the sinewy arms of rea- 
son and like a winged courser spurns 
the firm green earth and speeds away 
upon wind and cloud, leaving neither 
trace nor footprint by which science 
may track its flight and bring us 
knowledge of the distant, shadowy 
country that we nightly visit. When 
137 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

we come back from the dream-realm, 
we can give no reasonable report of 
what we met there. But once across 
the border, we feel at home as if we 
had always lived there and had never 
made any excursions into this rational, 
daylight world. 

My dreams do not seem to differ very 
much from the dreams of other people. 
Some of them are coherent and safely 
hitched to an event or a conclusion. 
Others are inconsequent and fantastic. 
All attest that in Dreamland there is no 
such thing as repose. We are always 
up and doing with a mind for any ad- 
venture. We act, strive, think, suffer, 
and are glad to no purpose. We leave 
outside the portals of Sleep all trouble- 
some incredulities and vexatious specu- 
lations as to probability. I float wraith- 
like upon clouds in and out among the 
138 



THE DREAM WORLD 



winds, without the faintest notion that I 
am doing anything unusual. In Dream- 
land I find little that is altogether strange 
or wholly new to my experience. No 
matter what happens, I am not aston- 
ished, however extraordinary the circum- 
stances may be. I visit a foreign land 
where I have not been in reality, and I 
converse with peoples whose language I 
have never heard. Yet we manage to 
understand each other perfectly. Into 
whatsoever situation or society my wan- 
derings bring me, there is the same 
homogeneity. If I happen into Vaga- 
bondia, I make merry with the jolly 
folk of the road or the tavern. 

I do not remember ever to have met 
persons with whom I could not at once 
communicate, or to have been shocked 
or surprised at the doings of my dream- 
companions. In its strange wanderings 
139 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

in those dusky groves of Slumberland 
my soul takes everything for granted 
and adapts itself to the wildest phan- 
toms. I am seldom confused. Every- 
thing is as clear as day. I know events 
the instant they take place, and wher- 
ever I turn my steps, Mind is my faith- 
ful guide and interpreter. 

I suppose every one has had in a 
dream the exasperating, profitless ex- 
perience of seeking something urgently 
desired at the moment, and the aching, 
weary sensation that follows each fail- 
ure to track the thing to its hiding- 
place. Sometimes with a singing dizzi- 
ness in my head I climb and climb, I 
know not where or why. Yet I cannot 
quit the torturing, passionate endeavor, 
though again and again I reach out 
blindly for an object to hold to. Of 
course according to the perversity of 
140 



THE DREAM WORLD 



dreams there is no object near. I clutch 
empty air, and then I fall downward, 
and still downward, and in the midst of 
the fall I dissolve into the atmosphere 
upon which I have been floating so pre- 
cariously. 

Some of my dreams seem to be traced 
one within another like a series of con- 
centric circles. In sleep I think I can- 
not sleep. I toss about in the toils of 
tasks unfinished. I decide to get up 
and read for a while. I know the shelf 
in my library where I keep the book I 
want. The book has no name, but I 
find it without difficulty. I settle my- 
self comfortably in the morris-chair, the 
great book open on my knee. Not a 
word can I make out, the pages are ut- 
terly blank. I am not surprised, but 
keenly disappointed. I finger the 
pages, I bend over them lovingly, the 
141 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

tears fall on my hands. I shut the book 
quickly as the thought passes through 
my mind, "The print will be all rubbed 
out if I get it wet." Yet there is no 
print tangible on the page ! 

This morning I thought that I 
awoke. I was certain that I had over- 
slept. I seized my watch, and sure 
enough, it pointed to an hour after my 
rising time. I sprang up in the greatest 
hurry, knowing that breakfast was 
ready. I called my mother, who de- 
clared that my watch must be wrong. 
She was positive, it could not be so late. 
I looked at my watch again, and lo ! the 
hands wiggled, whirled, buzzed and dis- 
appeared. I awoke more fully as my 
dismay grew, until I was at the antip- 
odes of sleep. Finally my eyes 
opened actually, and I knew that I had 
been dreaming. I had only waked into 
142 



THE DREAM WORLD 



sleep. What is still more bewildering, 
there is no difference between the con- 
sciousness of the sham waking and that 
of the real one. 

It is fearful to think that all that we 
have ever seen, felt, read, and done may 
suddenly rise to our dream- vision, as the 
sea casts up objects it has swallowed. I 
have held a little child in my arms in the 
midst of a riot and spoken vehemently, 
imploring the Russian soldiers not to 
massacre the Jews. I have re-lived the 
agonizing scenes of the Sepoy Rebellion 
and the French Revolution. Cities have 
burned before my eyes, and I have 
fought the flames until I fell exhausted. 
Holocausts overtake the world, and I 
struggle in vain to save my friends. 

Once in a dream a message came 
speeding over land and sea that winter 
was descending upon the world from 
143 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

the North Pole, that the Arctic zone 
was shifting to our mild climate. Far 
and wide the message flew. The ocean 
was congealed in midsummer. Ships 
were held fast in the ice by thousands, 
the ships with large, white sails were 
held fast. Riches of the Orient and the 
plenteous harvests of the Golden West 
might no more pass between nation and 
nation. For some time the trees and 
flowers grew on, despite the intense 
cold. Birds flew into the houses for 
safety, and those which winter had 
overtaken lay on the snow with wings 
spread in vain flight. At last the foli- 
age and blossoms fell at the feet of 
Winter. The petals of the flowers were 
turned to rubies and sapphires. The 
leaves froze into emeralds. The trees 
moaned and tossed their branches as the 
frost pierced them through bark and 
144 



THE DREAM WORLD 



sap, pierced into their very roots. I 
shivered myself awake, and with a tu- 
mult of joy I breathed the many sweet 
morning odors wakened by the summer 
sun. 

One need not visit an African jungle 
or an Indian forest to hunt the tiger. 
One can lie in bed amid downy pillows 
and dream tigers as terrible as any in 
the pathless wild. I was a little girl 
when one night I tried to cross the gar- 
den in front of my aunt's house in 
Alabama. I was in pursuit of a large 
cat with a great bushy tail. A few 
hours before he had clawed my little 
canary out of its cage and crunched it 
between his cruel teeth. I could not see 
the cat. But the thought in my mind 
was distinct: "He is making for the 
high grass at the end of the garden. 
I '11 get there first !" I put my hand on 
10 145 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

the box border and ran swiftly along 
the path. When I reached the high 
grass, there was the cat gliding into the 
wavy tangle. I rushed forward and 
tried to seize him and take the bird from 
between his teeth. To my horror a 
huge beast, not the cat at all, sprang 
out from the grass, and his sinewy 
shoulder rubbed against me with palpi- 
tating strength ! His ears stood up and 
quivered with anger. His eyes were 
hot. His nostrils were large and wet. 
His lips moved horribly. I knew it was 
a tiger, a real live tiger, and that I 
should be devoured — my little bird and 
I. I do not know what happened after 
that. The next important thing seldom 
happens in dreams. 

Some time earlier I had a dream 
which made a vivid impression upon me. 
My aunt was weeping because she 
146 



THE DREAM WORLD 



could not find me. But I took an impish 
pleasure in the thought that she and 
others were searching for me, and mak- 
ing great noise which I felt through 
my feet. Suddenly the spirit of mis- 
chief gave way to uncertainty and fear. 
I felt cold. The air smelt like ice and 
salt. I tried to run ; but the long grass 
tripped me, and I fell forward on my 
face. I lay very still, feeling with all 
my body. After a while my sensations 
seemed to be concentrated in my fingers, 
and I perceived that the grass blades 
were sharp as knives, and hurt my 
hands cruelly. I tried to get up cau- 
tiously, so as not to cut myself on the 
sharp grass. I put down a tentative 
foot, much as my kitten treads for the 
first time the primeval forest in the 
back yard. All at once I felt the 
stealthy patter of something creeping, 
147 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

creeping, creeping purposefully to- 
ward me. I do not know how at that 
time the idea was in my mind ; I had no 
words for intention or purpose. Yet it 
was precisely the evil intent, and not the 
creeping animal that terrified me. I 
had no fear of living creatures. I loved 
my father's dogs, the frisky little calf, 
the gentle cows, the horses and mules 
that ate apples from my hand, and none 
of them had ever harmed me. I lay 
low, waiting in breathless terror for the 
creature to spring and bury its long 
claws in my flesh. I thought, "They 
will feel like turkey-claws." Some- 
thing warm and wet touched my face. 
I shrieked, struck out frantically, and 
awoke. Something was still struggling 
in my arms. I held on with might and 
main until I was exhausted, then I 
loosed my hold. I found dear old Belle, 
148 



THE DREAM WORLD 



the setter, shaking herself and looking 
at me reproachfully. She and I had 
gone to sleep together on the rug, and 
had naturally wandered to the dream- 
forest where dogs and little girls hunt 
wild game and have strange adven- 
tures. We encountered hosts of elfin 
foes, and it required all the dog tactics 
at Belle's command to acquit herself 
like the lady and huntress that she was. 
Belle had her dreams too. We used to 
lie under the trees and flowers in the old 
garden, and I used to laugh with de- 
light when the magnolia leaves fell with 
little thuds, and Belle jumped up, 
thinking she had heard a partridge. 
She would pursue the leaf, point it, 
bring it back to me and lay it at my feet 
with a humorous wag of her tail as 
much as to say, "This is the kind of bird 
that waked me." I made a chain for 
149 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

her neck out of the lovely blue Paulo w- 
nia flowers and covered her with great 
heart-shaped leaves. 

Dear old Belle, she has long been 
dreaming among the lotus-flowers and 
poppies of the dogs' paradise. 

Certain dreams have haunted me 
since my childhood. One which recurs 
often proceeds after this wise: A spirit 
seems to pass before my face. I feel an 
extreme heat like the blast from an en- 
gine. It is the embodiment of evil. I 
must have had it first after the day that 
I nearly got burnt. 

Another spirit which visits me often 
brings a sensation of cool dampness, 
such as one feels on a chill November 
night when the window is open. The 
spirit stops just beyond my reach, 
sways back and forth like a creature in 
grief. My blood is chilled, and seems 
150 



THE DREAM WORLD 



to freeze in my veins. I try to move, 
but my body is still, and I cannot even 
cry out. After a while 'the spirit passes 
on, and I say to myself shudderingly, 
"That was Death. I wonder if he has 
taken her." The pronoun stands for 
my Teacher. 

In my dreams I have sensations, 
odors, tastes, and ideas which I do not 
remember to have had in reality. Per- 
haps they are the glimpses which my 
mind catches through the veil of sleep 
of my earliest babyhood. I have heard 
"the trampling of many waters." 
Sometimes a wonderful light visits me 
in sleep. Such a flash and glory as it 
is! I gaze and gaze until it vanishes. 
I smell and taste much as in my waking 
hours; but the sense of touch plays a 
less important part. In sleep I almost 
never grope. No one guides me. Even 
151 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

in a crowded street I am self-sufficient, 
and I enjoy an independence quite for- 
eign to my physical life. Now I seldom 
spell on my fingers, and it is still rarer 
for others to spell into my hand. My 
mind acts independent of my physical 
organs. I am delighted to be thus en- 
dowed, if only in sleep; for then my 
soul dons its winged sandals and joy- 
fully joins the throng of happy beings 
who dwell beyond the reaches of bodily 
sense. 

The moral inconsistency of dreams is 
glaring. Mine grow less and less ac- 
cordant with my proper principles. I 
am nightly hurled into an unethical 
medley of extremes. I must either de- 
fend another to the last drop of my 
blood or condemn him past all repent- 
ing. I commit murder, sleeping, to 
save the lives of others. I ascribe to 
152 



THE DREAM WORLD 



those I love best acts and words which it 
mortifies me to remember, and I cast 
reproach after reproach upon them. 
It is fortunate for our peace of mind 
that most wicked dreams are soon for- 
gotten. Death, sudden and awful, 
strange loves and hates remorselessly 
pursued, cunningly plotted revenge, are 
seldom more than dim haunting recol- 
lections in the morning, and during the 
day they are erased by the normal activ- 
ities of the mind. Sometimes immedi- 
ately on waking, I am so vexed at the 
memory of a dream-fracas, I wish I 
may dream no more. With this wish 
distinctly before me I drop off again 
into a new turmoil of dreams. 

Oh, dreams, what opprobrium I heap 

upon you— you, the most pointless 

things imaginable, saucy apes, brewers 

of odious contrasts, haunting birds of 

153 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

ill omen, mocking echoes, unseasonable 
reminders, oft-returning vexations, 
skeletons in my morris-chair, jesters in 
the tomb, death's-heads at the wedding 
feast, outlaws of the brain that every 
night defy the mind's police service, 
thieves of my Hesperidean apples, 
breakers of my domestic peace, murder- 
ers of sleep. "Oh, dreadful dreams 
that do fright my spirit from her pro- 
priety!" No wonder that Hamlet pre- 
ferred the ills he knew rather than run 
the risk of one dream- vision. 

Yet remove the dream-world, and the 
loss is inconceivable. The magic spell 
which binds poetry together is broken. 
The splendor of art and the soaring 
might of imagination are lessened be- 
cause no phantom of fadeless sunsets 
and flowers urges onward to a goal. 
Gone is the mute permission or conniv- 
154 



THE DREAM WORLD 



ance which emboldens the soul to mock 
the limits of time and space, forecast 
and gather in harvests of achievement 
for ages yet unborn. Blot out dreams, 
and the blind lose one of their chief 
comforts; for in the visions of sleep 
they behold their belief in the seeing 
mind and their expectation of light be- 
yond the blank, narrow night justified. 
Nay, our conception of immortality is 
shaken. Faith, the motive-power of 
human life, flickers out. Before such 
vacancy and bareness the shock of 
wrecked worlds were indeed welcome. 
In truth, dreams bring us the thought 
independently of us and in spite of us 
that the soul 

may right 
Her nature, shoot large sail on lengthening 

cord, 
And rush exultant on the Infinite. 



155 



XIV 

DREAMS AND REALITY 

IT is astonishing to think how our real 
wide-awake life revolves around 
the shadowy unrealities of Dreamland. 
Despite all that we say about the incon- 
sequence of dreams, we often reason by 
them. We stake our greatest hopes 
upon them. Nay, we build upon them 
the fabric of an ideal world. I can re- 
call few fine, thoughtful poems, few 
noble works of art or any system of 
philosophy in which there is not evi- 
dence that dream-fantasies symbolize 
truths concealed by phenomena. 

The fact that in dreams confusion 
reigns, and illogical connections occur 
156 



DREAMS AND REALITY 

gives plausibility to the theory which 
Sir Arthur Mitchell and other scientific 
men hold, that our dream-thinking is 
uncontrolled and undirected by the will. 
The will — the inhibiting and guiding 
power — finds rest and refreshment in 
sleep, while the mind, like a bark with- 
out rudder or compass, drifts aimlessly 
upon an uncharted sea. But curiously 
enough, these fantasies and intertwist- 
ings of thought are to be found in great 
imaginative poems like Spenser's 
"Faerie Queene." Lamb was impressed 
by the analogy between our dream- 
thinking and the work of the imagina- 
tion. Speaking of the episode in the 
cave of Mammon, Lamb wrote: 

"It is not enough to say that the whole 
episode is a copy of the mind's concep- 
tions in sleep; it is — in some sort, but 
what a copy! Let the most romantic of 
157 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

us that has been entertained all night 
with the spectacle of some wild and 
magnificent vision, re-combine it in the 
morning and try it by his waking judg- 
ment. That which appeared so shifting 
and yet so coherent, while that faculty 
was passive, when it comes under cool 
examination shall appear so reasonless 
and so unlinked, that we are ashamed to 
have been so deluded, and to have taken, 
though but in sleep, a monster for a 
god. But the transitions in this episode 
are every whit as violent as in the most 
extravagant dream, and yet the waking 
judgment ratifies them." 

Perhaps I feel more than others the 
analogy between the world of our wak- 
ing life and the world of dreams be- 
cause before I was taught, I lived in a 
sort of perpetual dream. The testi- 
mony of parents and friends who 
158 



DREAMS AND REALITY 

watched me day after day is the only 
means that I have of knowing the ac- 
tuality of those early, obscure years of 
my childhood. The physical acts of go- 
ing to bed and waking in the morning 
alone mark the transition from reality 
to Dreamland. As near as I can tell, 
asleep or awake I only felt with my 
body. I can recollect no process which 
I should now dignify with the term of 
thought. It is true that my bodily sen- 
sations were extremely acute; but be- 
yond a crude connection with physical 
wants they were not associated or 
directed. They had little relation to 
each other, to me, or to the experience 
of others. Idea — that which gives iden- 
tity and continuity to experience — 
came into my sleeping and waking 
existence at the same moment with 
the awakening of self -consciousness. 
159 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

Before that moment my mind was 
in a state of anarchy in which mean- 
ingless sensations rioted, and if thought 
existed, it was so vague and inconsequent, 
it cannot be made a part of discourse. Yet 
before my education began, I dreamed. 
I know that I must have dreamed because 
I recall no break in my tactual experi- 
ences. Things fell suddenly, heavily. I 
felt my clothing afire, or I fell into a tub 
of cold water. Once I smelt bananas, and 
the odor in my nostrils was so vivid that 
in the morning, before I was dressed, 
I went to the sideboard to look for the 
bananas. There were no bananas, and 
no odor of bananas anywhere ! My life 
was in fact a dream throughout. 

The likeness between my waking 

state and the sleeping one is still 

marked. In both states I see, but not 

with my eyes. I hear, but not with my 

160 



DREAMS AND REALITY 

ears. I speak, and am spoken to, with- 
out the sound of a voice. I am moved to 
pleasure by visions of ineffable beauty 
which I have never beheld in the physi- 
cal world. Once in a dream I held in 
my hand a pearl. I have no memory- 
vision of a real pearl. The one I saw in 
my dreams must, therefore, have been a 
creation of my imagination. It was a 
smooth, exquisitely molded crystal. 
As I gazed into its shimmering deeps, 
my soul was flooded with an ecstasy of 
tenderness, and I was filled with won- 
der as one who should for the first time 
look into the cool, sweet heart of a rose. 
My pearl was dew and fire, the velvety 
green of moss, the soft whiteness of 
lilies, and the distilled hues and sweet- 
ness of a thousand roses. It seemed to 
me, the soul of beauty was dissolved in 
its crystal bosom. This beauteous vision 
11 161 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

strengthens my conviction that the 
world which the mind builds up out of 
countless subtle experiences and sug- 
gestions is fairer than the world of the 
senses. The splendor of the sunset my 
friends gaze at across the purpling hills 
is wonderful. But the sunset of the 
inner vision brings purer delight be- 
cause it is the worshipful blending of all 
the beauty that we have known and de- 
sired. 

I believe that I am more fortunate in 
my dreams than most people; for as I 
think back over my dreams, the pleasant 
ones seem to predominate, although 
we naturally recall most vividly and tell 
most eagerly the grotesque and fantas- 
tic adventures in Slumberland. I have 
friends, however, whose dreams are al- 
ways troubled and disturbed. They 
wake fatigued and bruised, and they 
162 



DREAMS AND REALITY 

tell me that they would give a kingdom 
for one dreamless night. There is one 
friend who declares that she has never 
had a felicitous dream in her life. The 
grind and worry of the day invade the 
sweet domain of sleep and weary her 
with incessant, profitless effort. I feel 
very sorry for this friend, and perhaps 
it is hardly fair to insist upon the plea- 
sure of dreaming in the presence of one 
whose dream-experience is so unhappy. 
Still, it is true that my dreams have uses 
as many and sweet as those of adversity. 
All my yearning for the strange, the 
weird, the ghostlike is gratified in dreams. 
They carry me out of the accustomed 
and commonplace. In a flash, in the 
winking of an eye they snatch the bur- 
den from my shoulder, the trivial task 
from my hand and the pain and disap- 
pointment from my heart, and I behold 
163 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

the lovely face of my dream. It dances 
round me with merry measure and darts 
hither and thither in happy abandon. 
Sudden, sweet fancies spring forth 
from every nook and corner, and de- 
lightful surprises meet me at every 
turn. A happy dream is more precious 
than gold and rubies. 

I like to think that in dreams we 
catch glimpses of a life larger than our 
own. We see it as a little child, or as a 
savage who visits a civilized nation. 
Thoughts are imparted to us far above 
our ordinary thinking* Feelings nobler 
and wiser than any we have known 
thrill us between heart-beats. For one 
fleeting night a princelier nature cap- 
tures us, and we become as great as our 
aspirations. I daresay we return to the 
little world of our daily activities with 
as distorted a half-memory of what we 
164 



DREAMS AND REALITY 

have seen as that of the African who 
visited England, and afterwards said he 
had been in a huge hill which carried 
him over great waters. The compre- 
hensiveness of our thought, whether we 
are asleep or awake, no doubt dependsr 
largely upon our idiosyncrasies, consti- 
tution, habits, and mental capacity. 
But whatever may be the nature of our 
dreams, the mental processes that char- 
acterize them are analogous to those 
which go on when the mind is not held 
to attention by the will. 



165 



XV 

A WAKING DREAM 

Ihave sat for hours in a sort of rev- 
erie, letting my mind have its way 
without inhibition and direction, and 
idly noted down the incessant beat of 
thought upon thought, image upon im- 
age. I have observed that my thoughts 
make all kinds of connections, wind in 
and out, trace concentric circles, and 
break up in eddies* of fantasy, just as in 
dreams. One day I had a literary frolic 
with a certain set of thoughts which 
dropped in for an afternoon call. I 
wrote for three or four hours as they ar- 
rived, and the resulting record is much 
like a dream. I found that the most dis- 
166 



A WAKING DREAM 



connected, dissimilar thoughts came in 
arm-in-arm — I dreamed a wide-awake 
dream. The difference is that in wak- 
ing dreams I can look back upon the 
endless succession of thoughts, while in 
the dreams of sleep I can recall but few 
ideas and images, I catch broken 
threads from the warp and woof of a 
pattern I cannot see, or glowing leaves 
which have floated on a slumber-wind 
from a tree that I cannot identify. In 
this reverie I held the key to the com- 
pany of ideas. I give my record of 
them to show what analogies exist be- 
tween thoughts when they are not 
directed and the behavior of real 
dream-thinking. 

I had an essay to write. I wanted my 

mind fresh and obedient, and all its 

handmaidens ready to hold up my hands 

in the task. I intended to discourse 

167 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

learnedly upon my educational experi- 
ences, and I was unusually anxious to 
do my best. I had a working plan in 
my head for the essay, which was to be 
grave, wise, and abounding in ideas. 
Moreover, it was to have an academic 
flavor suggestive of sheepskin, and the 
reader was to be duly impressed with 
the austere dignity of cap and gown. I 
shut myself up in the study, resolved to 
beat out on the keys of my typewriter 
this immortal chapter of my life-his- 
tory. Alexander was no more confident 
of conquering Asia with the splendid 
army which his father Philip had disci- 
plined than I was of finding my mental 
house in order and my thoughts obedi- 
ent. My mind had had a long vacation, 
and I was now coming back to it in an 
hour that it looked not for me. My sit- 
uation was similar to that of the master 
168 



A WAKING DREAM 



who went into a far country and ex- 
pected on his home coming to find ev- 
erything as he left it. But returning he 
found his servants giving a party. Con- 
fusion was rampant. There was fiddling 
and dancing and the babble of many 
tongues, so that the voice of the master 
could not be heard. Though he shouted 
and beat upon the gate, it remained 
closed. 

So it was with me. I sounded the 
trumpet loud and long; but the vassals 
of thought would not rally to my stan- 
dard. Each had his arm round the waist 
of a fair partner, and I know not what 
wild tunes "put life and mettle into 
their heels." There was nothing to do. 
I looked about helplessly upon my 
great retinue, and realized that it is not 
the possession of a thing but the ability 
to use it which is of value. I settled 
169 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

back in my chair to watch the pageant. 
It was rather pleasant sitting there, 
"idle as a painted ship upon a painted 
ocean," watching my own thoughts at 
play. It was like thinking fine things 
to say without taking the trouble to 
write them. I felt like Alice in Won- 
derland when she ran at full speed with 
the red queen and never passed any- 
thing or got anywhere. 

The merry frolic went on madly. 
The dancers were all manner of 
thoughts. There were sad thoughts and 
happy thoughts, thoughts suited to 
every clime and weather, thoughts bear- 
ing the mark of every age and nation, 
silly thoughts and wise thoughts, 
thoughts of people, of things, and of 
nothing, good thoughts, impish thoughts 
and large, gracious thoughts. There 
they went swinging hand-in-hand in 
170 



A WAKING DREAM 



corkscrew fashion. An antic jester in 
green and gold led the dance. The 
guests followed no order or precedent. 
No two thoughts were related to each 
other even by the fortieth cousinship. 
There was not so much as an interna- 
tional alliance between them. Each 
thought behaved like a newly created 
poet. 

His mouth he could not ope, 
But there flew out a trope. 

Magical lyrics— oh, if I only had writ- 
ten them down! Pell-mell they came 
down the sequestered avenues of my 
mind, this merry throng. With baccha- 
nal song and shout they came, and eye 
hath not since beheld confusion worse 
confounded. 

Shut your eyes, and see them come— 
the knights and ladies of my revel. 
Plumed and turbaned they come, clad in 
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THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

mail and silken broideries, gentle maids 
in Quaker gray, gay princes in scarlet 
cloaks, coquettes with roses in their hair, 
monks in cowls that might have covered 
the tall Minster Tower, demure little 
girls hugging paper dolls, and rollick- 
ing school-boys with ruddy morning 
faces, an absent-minded professor car- 
rying his shoes under his arms and 
looking wise, followed by cronies, fair- 
ies, goblins, and all the troops just loosed 
from Noah's storm-tossed ark. They 
walked, they strutted, they soared, they 
swam, and some came in through fire. 
One sprite climbed up to the moon on a 
ladder made of leaves and frozen dew- 
drops. A peacock with a great hooked 
bill flew in and out among the branches 
of a pomegranate-tree pecking the rosy 
fruit. He screamed so loud that Apollo 
turned in his chariot of flame and from 
172 




Copyright, lUUi, by Tim Whitman Studi< 

The Little Boy Next Door 



A WAKING DREAM 



his burnished bow shot golden arrows 
at him. This did not disturb the pea- 
cock in the least ; for he spread his gem- 
like wings and flourished his wonderful, 
fire-tipped tail in the very face of the 
sun-god! Then came Venus— an exact 
copy of my own plaster cast— serene, 
calm-eyed, dancing "high and dispos- 
edly" like Queen Elizabeth, surrounded 
by a troop of lovely Cupids mounted on 
rose-tinted clouds, blown hither and 
thither by sweet winds, while all around 
danced flowers and streams and queer 
little Japanese cherry-trees in pots! 
They were followed by jovial Pan 
with green hair and jeweled sandals, 
and by his side — I could scarcely believe 
my eyes ! walked a modest nun counting 
her beads. At a little distance were seen 
three dancers arm-in-arm, a lean, 
starved platitude, a rosy, dimpled joke, 
173 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

and a steel-ribbed sermon on predesti- 
nation. Close upon them came a whole 
string of Nights with wind-blown 
hair and Days with fagots on their 
backs. All at once I saw the ample fig- 
ure of Life rise above the whirling mass 
holding a naked child in one hand and 
in the other a gleaming sword. A bear 
crouched at her feet, and all about her 
swirled and glowed a multitudinous host 
of tiny atoms which sang all together, 
"We are the will of God." Atom wed- 
ded atom, and chemical married chemi- 
cal, and the cosmic dance went on in 
changing, changeless measure, until my 
head sang like a buzz-saw. 

Just as I was thinking I would leave 
this scene of phantoms and take a stroll 
in the quiet groves of Slumber I noticed 
a commotion near one of the entrances 
to my enchanted palace. It was evident 
174 



A WAKING DREAM 



from the whispering and buzzing that 
went round that more celebrities had ar- 
rived. The first personage I saw was 
Homer, blind no more, leading by a 
golden chain the white-beaked ships of 
the Achaians bobbing their heads and 
squawking like so many white swans. 
Plato and Mother Goose with the numer- 
ous children of the Shoe came next. Sim- 
ple Simon, Jill and Jack, who had just 
had his head mended, and the cat that 
fell into the cream — all these danced in 
a giddy reel, while Plato solemnly dis- 
coursed on the laws of Topsyturvy 
Land. Then followed grim-visaged 
Calvin and "violet-crowned, sweet-smil- 
ing Sappho" who danced a schottische. 
Aristophanes and Moliere joined for a 
measure, both talking at once, Moliere 
in Greek and Aristophanes in German. 
I thought this odd because it occurred 
175 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

to me that German was a dead lan- 
guage before Aristophanes was born. 
Bright-eyed Shelley brought in a flut- 
tering lark which burst into the song of 
Chaucer's chanticleer. Henry Esmond 
gave his hand in a stately minuet to Di- 
ana of the Crossways. He evidently 
did not understand her nineteenth-cen- 
tury wit ; for he did not laugh. Perhaps 
he had lost his taste for clever women. 
Anon Dante and Swedenborg came to- 
gether conversing earnestly about things 
remote and mystical. Swedenborg said 
it was very warm. Dante replied that it 
might rain in the night. 

Suddenly there was a great clamor, 
and I found that "The Battle of the 
Books" had begun raging anew. Two 
figures entered in lively dispute. One 
was dressed in plain homespun and the 
other wore a scholar's gown over a suit 
176 



A WAKING DREAM 



of motley. I gathered from their con- 
versation that they were Cotton Mather 
and William Shakspere. Mather in- 
sisted that the witches in "Macbeth" 
should be caught and hanged. Shak- 
spere replied that the witches had al- 
ready suffered enough at the hands of 
commentators. They were pushed 
aside by the twelve knights of the 
Round Table, who marched in bearing 
on a salver the goose that laid golden 
eggs. "The Pope's Mule" and "The 
Golden Bull" had a combat of history 
and fiction such as I had read of in 
books, but never before witnessed. 
These little animals were put to rout by 
a huge elephant which lumbered in with 
Rudyard Kipling riding high on its 
trunk. The elephant changed suddenly 
to "a rakish craft." (I do not know 
what a rakish craft is ; but this was very 

12 m 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

rakish and very crafty.) It must have 
been abandoned long ago by wild pi- 
rates of the southern seas ; for clinging 
to the rigging, and jovially cheering as 
the ship went down, I made out a man 
with blazing eyes, clad in a velveteen 
jacket. As the ship disappeared from 
sight, Falstaff rushed to the rescue of 
the lonely navigator— and stole his 
purse ! But Miranda persuaded him to 
give it back. Stevenson said, "Who 
steals my purse steals trash." FalstafF 
laughed and called this a good joke, as 
good as any he had heard in his day. 

This was the signal for a rushing 
swarm of quotations. They surged to 
and fro, an inchoate throng of half -fin- 
ished phrases, mutilated sentences, par- 
odied sentiments, and brilliant meta- 
phors. I could not distinguish any 
phrases or ideas of my own making. I 
178 



A WAKING DREAM 



saw a poor, ragged, shrunken sentence 
that might have been mine own catch 
the wings of a fair idea with the light of 
genius shining like a halo about its head. 
Ever and anon the dancers changed 
partners without invitation or permis- 
sion. Thoughts fell in love at sight, 
married in a measure, and joined hands 
without previous courtship. An incon- 
gruity is the wedding of two thoughts 
which have had no reasonable courtship, 
and marriages without wooing are apt 
to lead to domestic discord, even to the 
breaking up of an ancient, time-hon- 
ored family. Among the wedded cou- 
ples were certain similes hitherto invio- 
lable in their bachelorhood and spinster- 
hood, and held in great respect. Their 
extraordinary proceedings nearly broke 
up the dance. But the fatuity of their 
union was evident to them, and they 
179 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

parted. Other similes seemed to have 
the habit of living in discord. They had 
been many times married and divorced. 
They belonged to the notorious society 
of Mixed Metaphors. 

A company of phantoms floated in 
and out wearing tantalizing garments 
of oblivion. They seemed about to 
dance, then vanished. They reappeared 
half a dozen times, but never unveiled 
their faces. The imp Curiosity pulled 
Memory by the sleeve and said, "Why 
do they run away? 'T is strange knav- 
ery!" Out ran Memory to capture 
them. After a great deal of racing and 
puffing and collision it apprehended 
some of the fugitives and brought them 
in. But when it tore off their masks, 
lo! some were disappointingly com- 
monplace, and others were gipsy quota- 
tions trying to conceal the punctuation 
180 



A WAKING DREAM 



marks that belonged to them. Memory 
was much chagrined to have had such a 
hard chase only to catch this sorry lot of 
graceless rogues. 

Into the rabble strode four stately 
giants who called themselves History, 
Philosophy, Law, and Medicine. They 
seemed too solemn and imposing to join 
in a masque. But even as I gazed at 
these formidable guests, they all split 
into fragments which went whirling, 
dancing in divisions, subdivisions, re- 
subdivisions of scientific nonsense ! His- 
tory split into philology, ethnology, 
anthropology, and mythology, and these 
again split finer than the splitting of 
hairs. Each specialty hugged its bit of 
knowledge and waltzed it round and 
round. The rest of the company began 
to nod, and I felt drowsy myself. To 
put an end to the solemn gyrations, a 

13 181 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

troop of fairies mercifully waved pop- 
pies over us all, the masque faded, my 
head fell, and I started. Sleep had 
wakened me. At my elbow I found my 
old friend Bottom. 

"Bottom," I said, "I have had a 
dream past the wit of man to say what 
dream it was. Methought I was— there 
is no man can tell what. The eye of 
man hath not heard, the ear of man hath 
not seen, his hand is not able to taste, his 
tongue to conceive, nor his heart to re- 
port what my dream was." 



182 



A CHANT OF DARKNESS 



"My wings are folded o'er mine ears, 
My wings are crossed o'er mine eyes, 
Yet through their silver shade appears, 
And through their lulling plumes arise, 
A Shape, a throng of sounds" 

Shelley" 's "Prometheus Unbound.'' 



1DARE NOT ask why we are reft of light, 
Banished to our solitary isles amid the 
unmeasured seas, 
Or how our sight was nurtured to glorious 

vision, 
To fade and vanish and leave us in the dark 

alone. 
The secret of God is upon our tabernacle ; 
Into His mystery I dare not pry. Only this 
I know : 

183 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

With Him is strength, with Him is wisdom, 
And His wisdom hath set darkness in our 

paths. 
Out of the uncharted, unthinkable dark we came, 
And in a little time we shall return again 
Into the vast, unanswering dark. 

O Dark! thou awful, sweet, and holy Dark! 

In thy solemn spaces, beyond the human eye, 

God fashioned His universe ; laid the founda- 
tions of the earth, 

Laid the measure thereof, and stretched the 
line upon it; 

Shut up the sea with doors, and made the 
glory 

Of the clouds a covering for it ; 

Commanded Hisi morning, and, behold ! chaos 
fled 

Before theurplifted face of the sun ; 

Divided a water-course for the overflowing 
of waters ; 

Sent rain upon the earth — 
184 



A CHANT OF DARKNESS 

Upon the wilderness wherein there was no man, 
Upon the desert where grew no tender herb, 
And, lo ! there was greenness upon the plains, 
And the hills were clothed with beauty ! 
Out of the uncharted, unthinkable dark we came, 
And in a little time we shall return again 
Into the vast, unanswering dark. 

O Dark ! thou secret and inscrutable Dark ! 

In thy silent depths, the springs whereof man 
hath not fathomed, 

God wrought the soul of man. 

O Dark! compassionate, all-knowing Dark! 

Tenderly, as shadows to the evening, comes 
thy message to man. 

Softly thou layest thy hand on his tired eye- 
lids, 

And his soul, weary and homesick, returns 

Unto thy soothing embrace. 

Out of the uncharted, unthinkable dark we came, 

And in a little time we shall return again 

Into the vast, unanswering dark. 
185 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

Dark! wise, vital, thought-quickening 

Dark! 
In thy mystery thou hidest the light 
That is the soul's life. 
Upon thy solitary shores I walk unafraid ; 

1 dread no evil; though I walk in the valley 

of the shadow, 
I shall not know the ecstasy of fear 
When gentle Death leads me through life's 

open door, 
When the bands of night are sundered, 
And the day outpours its light. 
Out of the uncharted, unthinkable darkwe came, 
And in a little time we shall return again 
Into the vast, unanswering dark. 

The timid soul, fear-driven, shuns the dark; 
But upon the cheeks of him who must abide 

in shadow 
Breathes the wind of rushing angel-wings, 
And round him falls a light from unseen 

fires. 

186 



A CHANT OF DARKNESS 

Magical beams glow athwart the darkness ; 
Paths of beauty wind through his black 

world 
To another world of light, 
Where no veil of sense shuts him out from 

Paradise. 
Out of the uncharted, unthinkable dark we came, 
And in a little time we shall return again 
Into the vast, unanswering dark. 

O Dark ! thou blessed, quiet Dark ! 

To the lone exile who must dwell with thee 

Thou art benign and friendly ; 

From the harsh world thou dost shut him in ; 

To him thou whisperest the secrets of the 

wondrous night; 
Upon him thou bestowest regions wide and 

boundless as his spirit ; 
Thou givest a glory to all humble things ; 
With thy hovering pinions thou coverest all 

unlovely obj ects ; 
Under thy brooding wings there is peace. 
187 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 



Out of the uncharted.unthinkable dark we came, 
And in a little time we shall return again 
Into the vast, unanswering dark. 



Once in regions void of light I wandered ; 

In blank darkness I stumbled, 

And fear led me by the hand ; 

My feet pressed earthward, 

Afraid of pitfalls. 

By many shapeless terrors of the night 

affrighted, 
To the wakeful day 
I held out beseeching arms. 

Then came Love, bearing in her hand 
The torch that is the light unto my feet, 
And softly spoke Love : "Hast thou 
Entered into the treasures of darkness? 
Hast thou entered into the treasures of the 
night? 

188 



A CHANT OF DARKNESS 

Search out thy blindness. It holdeth 
Riches past computing." 

The words of Love set my spirit aflame. 
My eager fingers searched out the mysteries, 
The splendors, the inmost sacredness, of 

things, 
And in the vacancies discerned 
With spiritual sense the fullness of life ; 
And the gates of Day stood wide. 

I am shaken with gladness ; 
My limbs tremble with j oy ; 
My heart and the earth 
Tremble with happiness ; 
The ecstasy of life 
Is abroad in the world. 

Knowledge hath uncurtained heaven ; 

On the uttermost shores of darkness there is 

light; 
Midnight hath sent forth a beam ! 
189 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

The blind that stumbled in darkness without 

light 
Behold a new day ! 

In the obscurity gleams the star of Thought ; 
Imagination hath a luminous eye, 
And the mind hath a glorious vision. 



m 



"The man is blind. What is life to 

him? 
A closed book held up against a sightless 

face. 
Would that he could see 
Yon beauteous star, and know 
For one transcendent moment 
The palpitating j oy of sight !" 

All sight is of the soul. 
Behold it in the upward flight 
Of the unfettered spirit ! Hast thou seen 
Thought bloom in the blind child's face ? 
190 



A CHANT OF DARKNESS 

Hast thou seen his mind grow, 
Like the running dawn, to grasp 
The vision of the Master? 
It was the miracle of inward sight. 

In the realms of wonderment where I 

dwell 
I explore life with my hands ; 
I recognize, and am happy ; 
My fingers are ever athirst for the earth, 
And drink up its wonders with delight, 
Draw out earth's dear delights ; 
My feet are charged with the murmur, 
The throb, of all things that grow. 

This is touch, this quivering, 
This flame, this ether, 
This glad rush of blood, 
This daylight in my heart, 
This glow of sympathy in my palms ! 
Thou blind, loving, all-prying touch, 
Thou openest the book of life to me. 
191 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 



The noiseless little noises of earth 

Come with softest rustle ; 

The shy, sweet feet of life ; 

The silky flutter of moth-wings 

Against my restraining palm ; 

The strident beat of insect-wings, 

The silvery trickle of water ; 

Little breezes busy in the summer grass ; 

The music of crisp, whisking, scurrying 

leaves, 
The swirling, wind-swept, frost-tinted 

leaves ; 
The crystal splash of summer rain, 
Saturate with the odors of the sod. 

With alert fingers I listen 

To the showers of sound 

That the wind shakes from the forest. 

I bathe in the liquid shade 

Under the pines, where the air hangs 

cool 
After the shower is done. 
192 



A CHANT OF DARKNESS 

My saucy little friend the squirrel 

Flips my shoulder with his tail, 

Leaps from leafy billow to leafy billow, 

Returns to eat his breakfast from my hand. 

Between us there is glad sympathy; 

He gambols ; my pulses dance ; 

I am exultingly full of the joy of life ! 

Have not my fingers split the sand 

On the sun-flooded beach? 

Hath not my naked body felt the water 

sing 
When the sea hath enveloped it 
With rippling music ? 
Have I not felt 

The lilt of waves beneath my boat, 
The flap of sail, 
The strain of mast, 
The wild rush 

Of the lightning-charged winds? 
Have I not smelt the swift, keen flight 
Of winged odors before the tempest? 
193 



THE WORLD I LIVE IN 

Here is joy awake, aglow; 
Here is the tumult of the heart. 

My hands evoke sight and sound out of feel- 
ing, 

Intershifting the senses endlessly ; 

Linking motion with sight, odor with 
sound 

They give color to the honeyed breeze, 

The measure and passion of a symphony 

To the beat and quiver of unseen wings. 

In the secrets of earth and sun and air 

My fingers are wise ; 

They snatch light out of darkness, 

They thrill to harmonies breathed in 
silence. 

I walk in the stillness of the night, 
And my soul uttereth her gladness. 
Night, still, odorous Night, I love thee ! 
O wide, spacious Night, I love thee ! 
O steadfast, glorious Night ! 
194 



A CHANT OF DARKNESS 

I touch thee with my hands ; 
I lean against thy strength; 
I am comforted. 

fathomless, soothing Night ! 

Thou art a balm to my restless spirit, 

1 nestle gratefully in thy bosom, 
Dark, gracious mother ! 

Like a dove, I rest in thy bosom. 
Out of the uncharted, unthinkable dark we came, 
And in a little time we shall return again 
Into the vast, unanswering dark. 



195 






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